Does Bob Dylan Deserve the Nobel Prize?

My late mother, bless her, prodded me to write better by withholding her approval, and I’m grateful to her for that in the same way that Philip Roth should be thankful to the Nobel committee. He and his admirers (and I’m one of them) might not have been able to enjoy the considerable pleasures of Roth’s late-career burst of ambition and prolificacy if he had not been fixated on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of course, he deserves the honor, at least as much as recent winners such as Herta Muller and Orham Pamuk—and certainly as much as Bob Dylan, apparently a near-winner in the officially secret competition. (I’ve read only a couple of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, and I did that this morning.)