Because Roth hammers so many real details and events into Bucky's story — so many of the little moments that make one man's life — it hurts to see Bucky towards the novel's end: disabled by polio and heavy with misplaced guilt, spending his sad days alone watching TV, eating a Portuguese meal on Sundays, and seeing imaginary flashes of Marcia Steinberg's pretty face in passing girls.

"Narrow" novelists cannot make you feel fiction this deeply, and few novelists can do it late into their 70s. Callil's claim that Roth "digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there" is absurd. Roth's best characters live with you. They have weight and shape. Long after reading about him, Bucky Cantor — like Alexander Portnoy — can come back to you at idle moments in your office cubicle.

Roth, furthermore, owns Newark. He owns it like Bellow owns Chicago. Interviewed after his win in May, Roth said that when he went to graduate school in Chicago in 1955 he used The Adventures of Augie March as a guidebook to the city. Few writers can put a city's pulse on the page. Roth, like Bellow, has done it. I've never set foot in Newark, but it would be wrong to say that I've never been there. Roth brings it to you — the schools, cemeteries and synagogues; the billboards, bus stops and butchers' shops — in his fiction. Perhaps more than anywhere, Newark is at the ballpark. This is from Portnoy's Complaint:

On Sunday mornings, when the weather is warm enough, twenty of the neighborhood men (this in the days of short center field) play a round of seven-inning softball games, starting at nine in the morning and ending about one in the afternoon, the stakes for each game a dollar a head. The umpire is our dentist, old Dr. Wolfenberg, the neighborhood college graduate — night school on High Street, but as good as Oxford to us. Among the players is our butcher, his twin brother our plumber, the grocer, the owner of the service station where my father buys his gasoline — all of them ranging in age from thirty to fifty, though I think of them not in terms of their years, but only as "the men." In the on-deck circle, even at the plate, they roll their jaws on the stumps of soggy cigars. Not boys, you see, but men. Belly! Muscle! Forearms black with hair! Bald domes! And then the voices they have on them — cannons you can hear go off from as far as our front stoop a block away.       
   [...]
   I tell you, they are an endearing lot! I sit in the wooden stands alongside first base, inhaling that sour springtime bouquet in the pocket of my fielder's mitt — sweat, leather vaseline — and laughing my head off. I cannot imagine myself living out my life any other place but here.     

None of this will satisfy Callil's search for the elusive "other" in literature. But it satisfies the terms of the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. Roth is alive, published in English, and his achievement in fiction is of the highest quality. Callil, elsewhere in her Guardian piece, admitted that the "essential matter" in judging the prize was "the quality of the writer, the body of work achieved and its value to the rest of the world." Yet Callil didn't want to judge the prize just on those terms. She wanted to celebrate foreign-language writing and the work of translators. Failing that, any of the 13 finalists apart from Roth, Callil wrote, "would have been acceptable" to her. This wasn't how she was asked to do the job. If I was hired to paint a man's house white, then painted it pink because I wanted to celebrate "other colours," I'd be fired, and rightly so. Instead, Callil quit.