The controversy: The Man Booker Prize, often seen as the alternate Nobel, is given to a writer for his or her work over a lifetime, and is awarded once every two years. This year’s jury – Rick Gekoski, Justin Cartwright and Carmen Callil – disagreed over the winner, Philip Roth. Ms Callil, former publisher of Virago Books, quit the jury in protest and said of Mr Roth: “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”
The argument for Roth: This might be summarised as “Give him the Nobel now”. Every year, the American writer’s name appears on the list of contenders for the Nobel Prize in literature; almost every review of Mr Roth’s recent work (Nemesis, The Humbling) contains the phrase “possibly America’s greatest living writer”.
The argument against Roth: To quote Ms Callil: “There are great moments in Roth’s work. He is clever, harsh, comic, but his reach is narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist.”
From Goodbye, Columbus onwards, Mr Roth’s essential world view has changed only very slightly. His obsessions have remained autobiographical; the fascination with exploring the world of American Jews, chiefly from the male perspective, has been constant; and almost all of his comedy and his view of the human condition are informed by this narrowness. His first and his second marriage, his affairs and years of therapy have all found their way into his novels, especially the nine books featuring Nathan Zuckerman and his family. Mr Roth’s range, despite his flair for comedy, his precision and flamboyant style, is limited; and as the novelist Philip Hensher noted, his books are of the kind many might read only once.
What you should read anyway: “Goodbye, Columbus is a first book,” Saul Bellow wrote of Mr Roth’s debut, “but it is not the book of a beginner.” Fifty-two years after it came out, Goodbye, Columbus remains a favourite first novel, not for its exploration of what it meant to be Jewish, assimilated or uneasily distant from the community, but because of Mr Roth’s skill at walking around inside the skin of his characters, from Neil Klugman to Brenda Patimkin. The best of Mr Roth – the humour, the sharpness, the self-deprecation as he analyses the world he and his characters inhabit, the awareness of the deep dilemmas, and the silliness of the human condition – are all here.
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was seen when it came out as an assault on the American Jewish family, with Mr Roth’s devastating portrait of a young Jewish man driven by confusion and lust, and the very funny look at his family, which featured the original “Jewish mother”. It was also, in retrospect, one of the first contemporary works of fiction to celebrate the relationship between therapists and their clients. With the passage of time, much that was shocking about Portnoy’s Complaint, including the infamous scene where Alexander Portnoy violates a piece of liver intended for the family dinner, has softened; what is left is the rich humour of the book.
Perhaps the richest of the Zuckerman books, The Human Stain (2000), deals with the travails of a black man who passes for a white, Jewish professor who is accused of racism; all of this is observed by Nathan Zuckerman. Of his later work, The Plot Against America (2004) is interesting for its re-imagining of the history of the US — in his alternate history, Roosevelt is defeated by Lindbergh, and the America of the 1940s becomes progressively more anti-Semitic. And Nemesis (2010) won critical praise for Mr Roth’s portrayal of the effects of a polio epidemic on a small and close-knit community.
Callil’s Complaint: Ms Callil’s real argument has been obscured by the many defences of Mr Roth. What she had to say was twofold: as a reader, Mr Roth didn’t appeal to her, and there is no real defence against that argument. As a reader, I share her indifference to Mr Roth — he strikes no major chord in me, and his writings have not shaped my vision. There are many who would argue exactly the opposite, and who would see his work as evidence of his rich understanding of the essential comedy of the human condition.
But Ms Callil’s second argument is more interesting: she made a plea to the jury to think differently about the canon a prize like the Man Booker was creating, to consider including more writers in translation, or to bring in the works of writers who were not such obvious choices. (The Man Booker jury considered 13 writers with close interest this year.) Ms Callil’s real argument is against the stodgy canon handed down for years by Harold Bloom and company, which was filled with dead (or living) white male writers. In that sense, choosing Mr Roth is an easy, obvious and comfortable choice, a soothing sop to a writer who hasn’t yet added the Nobel to his long list of gongs. But, at the risk of offending Mr Roth’s fans, only the minor controversy over Ms Callil’s exit makes this an interesting choice. The Man Booker jury made a safe, predictable and boring call this year.
