Philip Roth is America's greatest living writer.

I did consider qualifying that assertion with words like 'arguably' or 'possibly', but it seemed redundant. Who is there to challenge? Since Saul Bellow died, the field is clear. Norman Mailer, also dead now, was never in the same league, as much as he desperately wanted to be. There was always an undertone of vulgarity in his vision of literature as a boxing match. Gore Vidal (and I yield to no man in my admiration for Gore Vidal) is simply too arch and eccentric, not to mention too amused by himself, to quite clamber onto the plinth. Tom Wolfe might have been a contender, but he blotted his copybook horribly with the ridiculous I Am Charlotte Simmons, a few years ago.  Only John Updike of the Grand Old Men (and, yes, I have noticed that I haven't cited any women; I look forward to your letters), can realistically claim comparable status; yet Philip Roth has, in greater measure, that genius for taking the particular and giving it universal significance. And Updike's new one, The Widows Of Eastwick (which I still haven't read) has not been well received.

And so on. The younger generations can account for themselves—and, besides, their acts have yet to play out. Perhaps some of them will achieve that holy grail of American letters—a second act. Philip Roth, though, having enjoyed a dazzling youth on the back of the iconic Portnoy's Complaint, and a creditable middle period, has, perhaps unexpectedly, embarked upon a late period of sustained greatness of Balzacian stamina. He is 75 now and, by my reckoning, he has had a sensational last 15 years, counting from, say, 1995 with Sabbath's Theatre, a book not always included in the list of his greatest, but which bristles with scabrous energy and is as funny as anything he's done. Including his new novel, Indignation.

Salman Rushdie once said to me that there are essentially two kinds of novel: the Something novel, in which the universe can be discovered in a grain of sand (he mentioned Jane Austen) and the Everything novel (he meant himself). Insofar as this slightly Cartesian division has any validity, Philip Roth is definitely of the Something school, where the Something is so often growing up in the Jewish community of Newark, New Jersey. As an English gentile whose entire experience of Newark, New Jersey is spending two hours collecting a hire car at the airport, I find it rather wonderful that Roth can compel my attention time and time again to this corner of human experience, repeatedly mining the same material, but never going over the same ground.

Indignation is a fairly slender novel; I doubt it runs to 50,000 words (your average 350-page paperback is going to be the thick end of 100,000). But it's breathtakingly accomplished in its economy and focus.

The year is 1951. The Korean War is being fought, and it forms the bogeyman of Marcus Messner's life. He's a gifted student with a potentially brilliant future, but he has no doubt that the price of failure for tripping up is to be drafted and killed in Korea (the possibility of surviving combat never occurs to him). He attends the local college, but chafes under his father's psychotic need to control him, and transfers to a Midwestern university in order to escape. Escape from what? Love. Family. Expectation. More than once his father says to him, "You are a boy with a magnificent future before you", and this is a hallmark sentence. The father lives in terror of the promise being snatched away by Fate. 'Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight', as Marlowe says of Faustus, and this unbearable prospect is always before him. It's what makes him lock the door against his teenage son when he comes home half an hour later than promised. It's the eternal question for Philip Roth: to whom does the talent belong? Does Marcus have the right to waste it, or even to risk it? Does he have the right to transplant it to this strange world in the Midwest where Jews and Negroes (as they were still called then) are a curiosity, and no one invests the same value in them that Marcus' father does?

It's not untypical that the Roth hero is caught between the poles of having intellectually outgrown his father and not yet having established himself as a man. Among other themes, Indignation is a brilliant study of the prickliness of the barely adult, as exemplified in the painful interviews Marcus has with the Dean of Men at Ohio Winesburg College. Having found his father's concern intolerable, and having fallen out with two successive roommates at Winesburg, Marcus also reacts violently to the Dean's interventions in his life. But the Dean is performing his pastoral duties as he would for any other student, and he does not have Messner's sense that this is a special person, a boy with a brilliant future ahead of him. A more mature fellow would have been able to acknowledge the spirit in which the Dean was acting. And Marcus is not allowed to escape without being asked whether maybe he, Marcus, is the problem, rather than all the others. Marcus' father is admittedly hysterical in his conviction that they are living a life where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences, but he is right. One thing can knock a life completely off-course, and in this Roth novel it's inevitably a woman.

Olivia Hutton is beautiful, gentile and damaged. But she is Marcus' first lover; she fellates him in his roommate's car on their first date, thus completely knocking the boy for six (this is pre-sexual revolution, remember). It goes without saying that Marcus is horrified to learn that he's not the only one to have been so favored by Olivia; but, intellectually precocious and emotionally retarded as he is, he's also bewildered. Marcus can't get over the affair, and his importuning becomes as insupportable to Olivia as his father's worrying was to him. Sex is a great leveller, and Roth knows only too well that intellectual precocity can be an actual obstacle to fulfillment. Like Marcus, I regret Olivia's departure and disappearance from college. Olivia is erotic and fun.

Roth is sometimes caricatured as little more than the novelist of the Jewish boy growing up and out of his background, but his scope is much greater. He has a brilliant ability to conjure a world lost or imagined. In The Plot Against America (2004), he constructed an alternative history for the USA in which Lindbergh won the presidency in 1932 and embraced a kind of American crypto-fascism with dire consequence for the jews. This is the kind of device on which cheap pulp novelists generally thrive, but in his hands the alternative history came to frightening life. Similarly, in Indignation, the Midwestern college to which Messner flees is given vital breath and color, and the set-piece climax of the year he spends there is startling and unexpected.

I close by returning to the matter of literary devices, and Roth's competition for the title of America's Greatest Writer. In Indignation, Roth employs an oblique implication that the novel is being narrated from beyond the grave, which again might have fallen flat in a lesser writer. Mailer made a hopeless hash of something comparable in his last book, The Castle In The Forest, which is an account of Hitler's early life narrated by a devil. An apparently dead narrator is not obviously a better idea. Roth gets away with it, and makes appalling sense of it by the end of the book. But then, he knows what he's doing with such conceits, much as he did with the last line of Portnoy's Complaint ("So," said the doctor. "Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?"), where he turned the novel into a music-hall joke. And, of course, Roth is the champion exponent of the post-modern trick of blurring the lines between author and opus (sometimes helped out by real life, such as when it turned out there was somebody going round Israel claiming to be Philip Roth). Paul Auster and others can play at their meta-fictional games, but Roth has the world's firmest grip on the relation between the writer and the written. I do sometimes wonder if the reason that he has not been given the Nobel Prize is because he's too good at this sort of thing—he makes it look easy—as well as being too funny, and too dirty. Stockholm also failed to give the Prize to Graham Greene, the greatest novelist of the Twentieth Century. They'd better get a move on if they're not to miss out on another of the greats.