Roth’s Latest Award Comes, of Course, With a Complaint

Philip Roth: pale and male. Image by Reuters

By Dan Friedman May 25, 2011

Unless he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, Philip Roth will win no bigger international literary award than the Man Booker International Prize that was announced May 18.

As well as being worth £60,000 ($100,000) to the winner, the International Prize has become an instant milepost on the world literary circuit due to the importance of the Man Booker organization’s original prize. Established in 1968, that prize — for fiction written in the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland — is without equal for its constituency. Ironically, Howard Jacobson, the current holder of that award, was often called “the British Philip Roth” in the early part of his career.

The award, announced at the Sydney Writer’s Festival in Australia, came with a degree of controversy as one of the judges resigned in protest at the decision to honor Roth. Carmen Callil, writer and founder of the feminist press Virago, claimed that Roth’s writing made it feel “as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”

In an article in the Guardian newspaper, the weekend after the announcement was made, Callil claimed that her objection was stylistic, not a feminist reaction to the misogyny of which Roth’s writing is often accused. She wrote, “The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.”

Callil further bemoaned the “limited vision” of the judges to award the prize to “yet another North American writer.” But this is only the fourth time the International Prize has been awarded and the first time it has gone to an American, though Roth was on the shortlist twice previously (in 2005 and 2007). The past winners are Alice Munro (from Canada), Chinua Achebe (from Nigeria) and the inaugural winner, Ismail Kadaré (from Albania) in 2005.

Although initially surprised by the award, Roth recorded a gracious video of thanks in which he stated his hope that the recognition would bring his work to readers who otherwise would not have seen it.

Surely those readers will not come from the American public or the American Jewish community for which Roth is already an icon and a hero. From his groundbreaking and hilarious novels “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959) and “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969), through decades of substantial Zuckerman novels and others, to the recent excellence of his shorter “Nemeses” novellas, Roth has presented a series of quintessentially American personae and situations. And on the way, he has won the National Book Award (twice), the PEN/Faulkner Award (three times), the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice) and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for “American Pastoral.”

Roth rarely makes public appearances, but the evening of the announcement he was the guest of honor of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at the Center for Jewish History, in New York. He read the closing pages of “Nemesis,” and listened to scholars discussing his work. Then, after a brief reception, he went home to continue his second half-century of literary virtuosity.

Dan Friedman is the arts and culture editor of the Forward.

Dan Friedman is the former executive editor and whisky correspondent of the Forward, and is the author of a book about Tears for Fears, the ’80s emo rock band.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO