As tired a term as “great American novel” is, this might just be it.

Firstly, scope is a requirement. If America is anything, it’s infinitude, potential, Deleuzean lines of flight going off in all directions, or at least seeming to. We need something that both gives the sense of the endless horizon, and also shows how it’s at least kind of a crock of shit. Gatsby would be the classic example, but it’s perhaps a bit too compact. American Pastoral set us in a place and a culture – Jewish suburban New Jersey – and shows the evolution of that place and culture across time, through one family. Swede Levov is the Jewish guy with the Aryan look, the shiksa wife, a rack of high school sports trophies, and a successful business, but it all seems fine for a while, but the cracks are starting to show (Dave Portnoy’s complaint?). And when the destructive forces of globalized capital and 1960s social unrest come to Newark, they come hard.

Philip Roth is thought of less and less these days – he’s not on many people’s reading list on either side of the culture war. He’s a problematic cishet white, but he was also repulsed by the right on a truly visceral level, and when he tried to make a stance in The Human Stain, against the backdrop of ‘90s PC culture, as it was called then, it fell flat, and it’s one of his worst books. And when he is thought of, it’s not for books like American Pastoral, but for Portnoy and his early, funny novels (this is where you get to pat yourself on the back for seeing a parallel) and his late-period success in The Plot Against America (which was an entertaining if self-congratulatory bit of paranoid fantasy). But I think it’s when he takes a look around at the way things just can’t stop going tits up – here, and also later masterworks like Everyman and Indignation – that he isn’t just a good writer, but a great one.