A certain Patrick Modiano is in the news. He just won this year’s Nobel prize in literature. Many commentators are confused. Modiano? And some are outraged. Philip Roth has lost yet another chance at the prize! It was similar last year, when a certain Alice Munro turned out to be the winner. Munro? A certain Mo Yan got it a year before. And so did a certain Tomas Tranströmer the previous year. And so forth. But how about Philip Roth, as well as so many others dear to someone or other? Reading all this gibberish, I cannot but think of Samuel Beckett. When his wife, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, heard that he had won the prize forty-five years ago, she was taken aback: “This is a catastrophe!” Beckett refused to attend the Nobel ceremony. And that is the only attitude toward the prize worth a writer worth reading. How about Philip Roth, though?