A WHILE AGO I GAVE A TALK AT MY old school in New York. My audience was aged between 10 and 17 and when it came to hand-raising and question-asking, the 10-year-olds were irrepressible and direct. They knew I was a literary critic or, at least, a book reviewer; that someone paid me to give opinions in public. So, first question: “How do you tell a book is good?” Fortunately, the answer is a little more complicated than: “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

This week, Philip Roth was named the winner of the PEN / Nabokov Award, a $20,000 prize for “a living author whose body of work . . . represents achievement in a variety of literary genres and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship”. Roth is 73; his latest novel, Everyman, has just been published to wide acclaim. I read it and was moved and amazed by what I saw as its power and simplicity. It is a short book that traces the physical and emotional depredations which mere existence enacts upon us. It takes its title from a medieval morality play, itself fewer than 1,000 lines long; and, I thought, echoed that form’s stark strength. I read Everyman and continued to marvel at Roth’s second flowering, as did The Times’s reviewer, Douglas Kennedy, who called it “brilliant”, “rooted in the realpolitik of human transience”.

But Michiko Kakutani, the eminent book critic of The New York Times, begs to differ. For “brilliant”, insert “flimsy” and you get the gist. What Kennedy (and I) saw as a depiction of universal truths, Kakutani saw as lack of characterisation, laziness or plain inanity: “Spending time with this guy is like being buttonholed at a party by a remote acquaintance who responds to a casual ‘Hi, how are you?’ with a half-hour whinge-fest about his physical ailments, medical treatments and spiritual complaints.”

So – who’s right? Somebody’s got to be the decider, right? Right. But here’s the beauty of it. What’s “good” for Kennedy is clearly not “good” for Kakutani. If we return to our fifth-grade questioner: I hope all this makes you wonder “but will it be ‘good’ for me?” Even literary critics cannot separate themselves – should not wish to separate themselves – from their emotional responses; opinions, however cogently expressed and concretely argued, are still just that, formed in mutable hearts and minds. Read the reviews, but I think they should make you curious, not convinced.

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