Like me, you think of Philip Roth
as having been one of the great voices of the last 50, 60, 70
years in Western fiction.
Can you tell me quickly why?
Yeah.
He's one of the giants, certainly
of post-war American fiction.
If you think of the biggest figures of the post-war era
in American letters, I think of Saul Bellow,
John Updike, Norman Mailer.
And Philip Roth belongs in that company.
And actually, to my mind, he's probably
the greatest of them all.
And that's partly a function of his extraordinary longevity.
He started publishing short stories in the late 1950s
and was still going strong as recently as 2010.
And there's an extraordinary stylistic evolution
in his work over that 60 year period.
But his mission was to disrupt.
Wasn't it?
His mission was to disrupt.
He wanted to boot out the respectable, very
serious, rather puritanical high ground of American literature
and introduce sex, reality.
And crucially Jewishness.
Sex and Jews are his favourite--
OK.
Sex and Jews.
--his favourite subject.
Yes.
And then not without controversy.
Not without controversy.
So in ni--
He was accused of being anti-Semitic even.
Well, he was.
In 1959, he wrote a short story called Defender
of the Faith, which attracted accusations
from the American Jewish community of him
being a self-hating Jew and of doing
anti-Semites' work for them.
And then he ran into exactly the same charge
10 years later with the publication of one
of his most famous novels and one of his funniest, Portnoy's
Complaint.
He also lived and wrote through the time
when the consciousness of women's lives and feminism
was growing like mad.
And of course, he fell tremendously
on the wrong side of that body of opinion.
In a way, I mean, I remember it because it was me
when I was young, a teenager, and started reading this stuff.
It was very hard to reconcile one's absolutely gobsmacked
admiration for this incredible writer
with one's growing feminist principles.
So it was difficult. And it culminated
in, I think, 2011 was-- or 10, I think it was,
the Man Booker International Prize when-- which he won.
And one of the judges, Carmen Callil, a feminist publisher,
walked out in protest.
And it did divide opinion very considerably
and was quite a challenge.
In a sense, you know, he was a man of his time.
And he wouldn't have thrived particularly
in the MeToo generation.
No, he was.
I mean, I think there is a difference in his attitudes
towards women, in his vision, to, say, that of Norman Mailer.
And his personal story, as far as his relations with women
concern, certainly not as chaotic or violent as Mailer's.
But as you say, he was a man of his time.
And his views about the relations between the sexes
reflect that.
But he would have said he was a student of Eros
and what that does to human beings, what erotic passion
does to human beings.
And he had an extraordinary late blooming
time with a run of the novels.
Just extraordinary.
Yeah.
That are known as the nemeses books.
Yeah.
Enoch Powell famously said that all political careers
end in failure.
And it's probably true about literary careers as well.
But he seems to have more or less avoided that.
And he also was very prescient.
You'll remember his 2004 novel The Plot Against America, which
imagines Charles Lindbergh being elected
as a quasi-Nazi President of the United States in 1940.
And read from the standpoint of today
and under the Trump administration,
that is beginning to look a bit like prophecy.
An extraordinary man and a great writer, Philip Roth.