Differences of literary taste and judgement are notoriouly difficult to resolve through discussion. No, make that impossible to resolve. (I once had a go at explaining why.) So it's no big deal that Carmen Callil couldn't see eye to eye with the other judges on the panel for the Man Booker International prize, and quit rather than be associated with awarding the prize to Philip Roth. But her statement that Roth 'goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book' I find obtuse. Roth does have his continuous preoccupations, that's for sure: sex, ageing, illness, death (you know, interests of that local kind); and also growing up Jewish in America, and the opacities within intimate relationships, and the sometimes infuriating but nonetheless indispensable ties of family. However, a continuous authorial voice and set of concerns is to be found in many writers, including great writers. It's just as true of another on that same Man Booker shortlist - Anne Tyler - that her books are all recognizably hers through some central thematic continuities. It's true of Austen and Dickens and Hardy, for goodness sake.
Callil can like Philip Roth or she can lump him; but the suggestion that his life's work is just all 'the same subject' ought to disqualify her from being on a literary judging panel. You don't have to admire Roth's work - though I do - to be able to see that Portnoy's Complaint and The Plot Against America, that The Ghost Writer and The Human Stain, that American Pastoral and Everyman, that I Married A Communist and Indignation or Nemesis display a certain variety of focus.