Philip Roth Is Apparently Not "Good Enough" for Swedes

I've long thought that Philip Roth was more than deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Certainly, he doesn't need the Nobel Prize to validate his career to me, himself, or anybody else; I just thought it would be nice. My belief in this only increased when I read some of the works of some recent Nobel winners, whose work was OK, but was really nothing "amazing" or "revolutionary" (Elfreide Jelinek, Toni Morrison, and Orhan Pamuk jump to mind here).

However, much as I love Roth's work, I always wondered if his focus on Jewish-American identity kept him from getting the award thus far. I always figured that his works could still appeal to a broad spectrum of people throughout the world due to the issues of generational change and religious-ethnic identities beyond the simple "Jewish-American" mantra, in the same way that Steinbeck's chronicles of the average American's struggles could be (and are) easily universalized. But I also suspected that a board of Swedish judges would be less-than-sympathetic or understanding.

It may be too early to tell, but it certainly looks like my latter suspicion was correct, and Roth probably won't be getting that award any time soon, simply leaving him to join the ranks of Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov as amazing writers the Nobel committee did not deem "worthy."