What are "other voices"? I have no idea, though apparently, as a reader, I'm sorely in "need" of them. Callil wants to celebrate them, along with other languages and other cultures. But what, precisely, are these things? Other than what? Voices other than Roth's? Languages other than English? Cultures other than the English-speaking world's? And what are "emperor's clothes"? Are they the same as the emperor's new clothes in Hans Christian Andersen's short story of 1837? If so, the point of the emperor's flashy new threads was that they weren't real. The story turned on the fact that they didn't exist. So if Roth, like Callil says, is dressed in them, they shouldn't be making any noises. What's this swishing sound she hears?

The weirdness about the mysterious "other" Callil seeks in literature — and fails to find in any of Roth's books — sounds like corridor chatter in the cultural studies department. Like the emperor's new clothes, "other voices" don't exist. There are strong literary voices and weak literary voices. There are fraudulent or derivative ones, and intelligent or seductive ones. There are many different kinds. Occasionally an authentic literary voice comes along that can claw out at you from the page. Dorothy Parker said that William Styron's words "took your heart and flung it over there." Roth can do that, and he's been doing it for 50 years.

Roth's fourth book, Portnoy's Complaint (1969) is a mad scream of a novel. It is so funny that you can read it once, then years later you remember some of the novel's best bits and you're in your office cubicle laughing like a tap-dancing lunatic in a tin foil hat. A novel that funny is an achievement worthy of a writer's entire working life, and it deserves respect. Had Roth written nothing else, he'd still, in my opinion, be a more worthy winner of the Nobel Prize for literature than the 2003 winner J.M. Coetzee, whose novel Foe (1986) — another campus classic, like Eucalyptus — struck me as pretension passed off as profundity. His fictionalised autobiography Youth (2002) struck me as plain pretentiousness.

But Roth has kept on writing. His reputation, in the four decades since Portnoy's Complaint, has suffered because of his refusal to be funny on every page, and for what Callil identifies, rightly, as his "self-involvement and self-regard". Late Roth isn't funny. It is brutally pessimistic, even nihilistic. But Roth is not a sad old man churning out "narrow" novels about himself from a farmhouse in rural Connecticut.

Roth, like Saul Bellow did, has applied himself to writing short novels in his old age. Last year he published Nemesis (2010), the fourth novel in a series he calls the "Nemeses" books. The first three books in the series — Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009) — were frightfully depressing reads. Everyman starts with a funeral and tells the story of how the man in the ground got there by wasting his life. Indignation is about a college student drafted to Korea where he dies in a ditch. The Humbling ends with the death of a talent-drained former actor, Simon Axler, who fires a shotgun round into his head. In the novel's final paragraph, a cleaning lady finds Axler's body on the floor.