There are many interesting games going on in Julius Taranto’s How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel about art and politics that seeks to skewer the prim puritans of radical wokery and the sweaty dinosaurs of the right. Part of the joke is that it is written very clearly in the style of, and in deep engagement with, a canon that literary America is doing its best to forget: Roth, Bellow and Updike are the obvious models. What’s more, as if snubbing his nose at those who will be looking for reasons to take offence, Taranto, a white male (he’s a former lawyer), writes from the perspective of a young Jewish woman, Helen, a graduate student. He takes great and obvious pleasure in describing her sex life, with a passage about masturbation that might have come straight from the pen of Philip Roth.
