If you are not a heterosexual Anglo-Saxon(ized) Jewish male of at least lower middle class social-standing, you are not among the target audience to whom Philip Roth wrote his work.

It's also the reason why Philip Roth will never win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not many members of his target audience are deciding who gets it, unlike in the Anglo-Saxon cultural circles, which have given him his fame and the prices he has won.

Like Norman Mailer, he's a misogynist, but at least Norman Mailer had a vision large enough to embrace people and societies (but not really the other gender) which he did not identify with. He was a universal writer. Philip Roth, to put it ugly, is a niche writer who doesn't want to get out of the ghetto of his own making, because he doesn't like the people outside it.

Philip Roth can write a novel about racism set in the 1930s without bringing up racism towards African-Americans, Philip Roth thinks that an African-American man who gets educated is envious of Jews and wants to become one of them, enough to lose his own identity.

And Philip Roth, like one critic put it, has only three subjects: The young male sexual beast, the middle-aged male sexual beast and the old male sexual beast.

To this we could add that his subjects are also WASMJs, White Anglo-Saxon Male Jews. Most of them are Philip Roth or had their seeds in particular character straits of Philip Roth as seen by himself. He is, in the end, a writer who made a small circle around himself early in his career and never crossed it.