Nobel Rot

Nadime Gordimer reviews Philip Roth's latest, Everyman, in The New York Times. Here's an excerpt:

His superbly matchless work, The Plot Against America, has the power of political fantasy moving out of literature into the urgent possibilities of present-day reality. With that novel he conveyed the Then in the Now. Hero-worship of Charles Lindbergh makes it feasible that he becomes president of the United States, despite his admiring embrace of Hitler; Bush never embraced Nazis, but the enthusiasm he elicits, through instilling fear in Americans who voted him into power and whose sons have come back in body bags along with the gruesome images of Iraqi dead, is no fantasy. And Lindbergh's anti-Semitism foreshadows the fundamentalisms that beset us in 2006.

Though Gordimer has won a Nobel Prize (an award Roth deserves), nothing she's written has impressed me as much as this. The amount of stupidity and/or dishonesty (the less dishonest, the more stupid) required to make such a claim is breathtaking.