What makes Roth great?

What makes Roth great? I'd say above all else it's his narrative voice. His narrators are most often variants on the author's own voice, whether directly identified as "Philip Roth" or identified with him through an avatar who shares many but not all of Roth's professional and biographical qualities and status details, or sometimes, through a more distant 3rd-person narration, his narrators inhabit Roth's familiar landscapes - Newark in the 1950s, the Berkshires and (less frequently) Manhattan in the 80s and 90s (Roth lived part-time in rural Conn., but the Berkshires serve his pastoral purposes. But the voice is always Roth's: full of mordant humor, obsession, confession, a deep interest in American politics and history, a bewildered Jewish faith and a wryly skeptical vision of contemporary Israel, nostalgia for a vanished community and way of life (2nd-generation Jewish working class Newark), and a frankness bordering on the confessional (if not obsessional) about sex. Despite the many different settings of his 30+ novels and several stories, I believe you could identify Roth as the author almost by selection of random paragraph and passage of dialog. Roth was not an experimental writer by any means - he began as a realist, and though his novels sometimes include elements that touch on magic realism (the "death" of the narrator in The Counterlife, e.g.), he was never taken by the formal inventiveness of postmodern fiction that dominated American academic fiction from the 70s through maybe the 90s, nor did he work in the surreal, dreamlike mode of many of the Eastern European writers whom he championed. But he was experimental, even avant garde, in his conceptual ability; many of his novels establish a "what if" and play out the concept: What if a professor accused of making a racist remark turns out, himself, to be a black man who has hidden his racial identity? What if an American hero, who turns out to be a fascist, were elected president? His fiction included topical themes - militant radical youth (American Pastoral), the polio epidemic of the 50s (Nemesis), e.g. - but was never in itself topical; he was always focused on the effect of world events on individuals and families. Roth will never be remembered for great plots - some of his best works (American Pastoral, Human Stain) just end abruptly, the way stories sometimes do but novels, rarely - which is probably why there has never been a great film of a Roth novel (the film of his early story Goodbye, Columbus is a great film, however). And I don't think he ever created a great female character (his women are stereotypes and his men are by no means "woke"). But there's so much greatness in his work, so much plenitude, so much humor, and so much fine writing that's never pretentious or arch or willfully inaccessible. His work will endure.