Which of his books should I read instead? Well, I mean I will finish this one, but which of his books is his best? American Pastoral?

His most famous and most entertaining book has got to be Portnoy's Complaint, which really is a laff riot in addition to being a painfully accurate picture about male sexuality.

However, the very very very best works of Philip Roth are the Zuckerman novels. Nathan Zuckerman is an amazing character in contemporary literature- he is both intensely likable and personally repugnant; incredibly revealing and willfully obscure; sexually adventurous and sadly alone. In short, he is a lot like every man in America between 20 and 90. Pick up a 2nd hand copy of Zuckerman Bound (the first 3 novels) and get into it.

Political or not, Orhan Pamuk, J. M. Coetzee, Imre Kertész, Günter Grass, José Saramago, Dario Fo, Seamus Heaney, Octavio Paz, Camilo José Cela, Joseph Brodsky, Gabriel García Márquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill and William Butler Yeats
are not writers who suck.

I will, however, give you Elfriede Jelinek. She does suck.

Maybe a month or so in the Sunday Magazine of the NYT they interviewed some literary someone or other who said she thought P Roth was a great writer, but that he hates women - in reference to his writing. (She was probably from Sarah Lawrence college.) I haven't read everything he has written, but I'm not sure I get that impression. Anyone else?

Didn't read the book, but I was one of the 5 people on the face of the planet that loved the movie.

On the other hand, make a list of the best writers of the twentieth century, and see how many got no Nobels, not even a sniff at them. Where's Nabokov? Hemingway? James Fucking Joyce? You think Seamus Heaney is better than James Motherfucking Joyce? Heaney isn't worth a pair of Joyce's used underpants, and he'd probably even agree with that. NONE of the poets except Yeats should be there. Where's Auden? Where's George Goddamn Orwell?

Jean-Paul Sartre, I ask you. Is there anybody who represents better the vacuity of a certain kind of postwar intellectual, I can't imagine who it is. Have you ever tried READING his crap? I actually read about half of Being and Nothingness (translated) when I was a pretentious undergrad, and those hours were more than wasted. Geez, if you're going to take someone from France, where's Raymond Queneau?

The relationship between literary greatness and the Nobel prize is essentially random.

If David Foster Wallace can pound out another Infinite Jest he'll be your next American to win.

I'm certainly not arguing that the Nobel is a perfect or complete prize - I share your outrage that Auden, Nabokov and Joyce never got the prize, not to mention Borges, Kafka, Stephan Mallarme, etc. etc.

But come on, all of those laureates made truly significant contributions to the literature of the world. Eliot was indispensable in the creation of modernist writing. Sartre popularized a philosophical theme that practically dominated literary writing for 50 years. (Not to mention discovering and championing Jean Genet!) Bertrand Russell was a pioneer in at least two huge literary developments. The Principia Matematica introduced a logical system that is STILL the dominant language among logicians and theoretical mathematicians. PLUS he made it safe and socially responsible to be a pacifist and atheist.

It's one thing not to like these writers. But claiming they suck? Don't be silly.

Hemingway won the award in 1954.

But Roth? Really? I like Roth (Portnoy's Complaint is one of my favorite books) but there's just no way in hell he's in line for the Nobel prize.