Letters

I would have thought that Philip Roth would have won a Nobel Prize. I am surprised he never did, though he was always mentioned as a potential recipient.  Nefarious powers that be must have kept him from winning the award--that or, perhaps he was not the all-powerful writer that I think he was, and my own lack of breadth in other writers is behind my indignation. I think not, though, I think he was a very good, or great writer, certainly one of the best post-war writers that genre I am most familiar with. And also depressing is the idea that if Roth, who was light years ahead of anything I might aspire to in terms of human insight would not have won such a prize, what level of inconsequence does that leave my own, indeed that of most of my friends, level of abilities. Roth had a grasp of dialogue, especially that of hard-boiled individuals. He did not quite, like Saul Bellow, create his own universes, but what I have read, probably about a third of his corpus, always struck me as being