Philip Roth's writing is anything but misogynistic I have been a fan of Roth for a long time. Like a lot of people, I had one or two of his novels on my shelf for quite a while, having purchased them because I thought I should - they looked good; made me look good. Then I actually read them, and once I started, I was hooked, eagerly grabbing the next almost before I had finished the one I was on. It is one of the delights of discovering a prolific author late in his or her career - you have plenty of material to be getting on with. I started with Portnoy's Complaint - dirty and fun, continued into When She Was Good and The Ghost Writer, then all the Zuckerman stories in some attempt at chronological order; The Human Stain with its extraordinary plot twist - a moment you have to re-read several times to ensure you got it right; American Pastoral which will get under your skin and stay there; The Plot Against America, which allows you to toy with an imaginary outcome of the Second World War too terrible to even think about in everyday life, and on and on - I lend them, I don't ask for them back, I buy them again, I re-read them, I think about them - they are bricks in the house of the my mind. Roth has always been seen as a chronicler of the American psyche, specifically the East Coast Jewish view of life, the world and beyond. Many of his novels are centred around the Jewish community of Newark, New Jersey, where he grew up, but there are also substantial chunks of time spent at Chicago University, where he often places academic characters, following his own period of time there. If the East Coast and the Mid-West are the twin pillars of intellectual life in the US, Roth has straddled them for all of his career, and it shows. But I think it is a mistake to say that he hates women. His female characters have always been as flawed, immoral, complicated and sharply written as his male characters. A writer is not a misogynist if he writes awful women. There are awful women, just as there are awful men. Female-friendly novels are not necessarily ones where all the women are heroines: long-suffering, strong, intuitive, wise, sexy, etc etc etc. Roth has always paid women the greatest compliment - to him, the genders are the same - he writes individuals, not just ciphers, mothers, sluts and goddesses. He loves to play with the dirtiest, nastiest ideas, the moral ambiguities of human interaction that can go from bleak to uplifting in the space of a page. Some find his unblinking look at our species too dark, but I have always found it to be the best company. He doesn't look away, he looks right at you, and it's comforting - Roth won't tell you any lies, that's for sure. The question is, are you up to the truth?