Letters: Roth, male writers and female readers
Your report (19 May) that Carmen Callil has dissociated herself from the choice of Philip Roth to win the International Man Booker prize highlights a point that I and many other women readers have been making for some time. There are some male writers who, as Callil is reported as saying about Roth, "go to the core of" male readers' being but whom she did not "rate ... as a writer at all". The reverse may be true of men reading women, but the literary world is still heavily dominated by what appeals to men. Recent controversy in the US about who might be the current "great American novelist" has reinforced the idea that this position can be occupied, if at all, only by a man.
A great writer has something to say to a wide range of serious readers. Of the names in the reported shortlist, I value Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson highly because they enrich my understanding of the world I live in and create sympathetic, memorable characters. Why then did the judge of the prize in question say "in a field that included Roth, tell me who else we could have picked?"
More women than men read fiction; at least as many women as men write fiction. Yet our opinions are still under-represented and undervalued in the world of serious literature.
Helen Steuart
Edinburgh
Carmen Callil wonders who will read Roth in 20 years. These days, perhaps the same could be said about many greats. Before they died, both Updike and Bellow strongly hinted as much at the rise of the net. As the attention is buried in a fury of competing mass media, it is all too easy for quality and truth to be drowned out. Though perhaps not every Philip Roth novel was great in the past, at his best, which he certainly now is in his shorter work, few currently living get close.
Stephen Crawford
Stamford, Lincolnshire