Afternoon:
10°c
There's damning with faint praise. And then there is just plain damning. William Dalrymple's demolition of VS Naipaul's new book will earn its place in the canon of killer reviews. His ad hominem attack murdered the Nobel Laureate's reputation.
"Naipaul has died as a writer," wrote Dalrymple in the Sunday Times. "The wisdom, the warmth, the humour, and, above all, the compassion have all gone from the prose. What we are left with is the bitter and desiccated husk of that once lively, warm and surprising writer from the village outside Port of Spain." Not since Tibor Fischer eviscerated Martin Amis's novel Yellow Dog in 2003 have we been treated to such a spectacular assassination: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad... It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Book reviews are normally couched in polite, pussy-footing caveats. It is a cosy world of mutual back-slapping where if Writer A praises Writer B then he can expect a reciprocal positive review in future.
So when a critic breaks ranks and tells the truth it inevitably causes a stir. It's a brave man who takes on a AND Nobel laureate. Yet Naipaul is not entirely blameless when it comes to literary homicide. Years ago he pronounced on "the death of the novel". Cynical readers might suspect Dalrymple has an ulterior motive. After all, Naipaul and he have crossed swords before over Islam. But Naipaul would be advised to keep his counsel and take a leaf out of John Steinbeck's book: "Unless the bastards have the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore them." When writers respond to critics, or knife-throwers as Raymond Chandler called them, they invariably end up making fools of themselves. Norman Mailer hit back at Michiko Kakutani, chief literary critic of The New York Times, describing her as a "onewoman kamikaze" who "disdains white male writers" and is unsackable because she is an "Asiatic feminist".
With one stroke of his pen he'd outed himself as a misogynistic xenophobe. And after Nicci Gerrard wrote a scathing critique of Jeanette Winterson, she opened her front door one night to find the indignant novelist demanding an explanation of her betrayal thus fuelling public suspicions that Ms Winterson had lost the plot.
One of Kakutani's kamikaze reviews from 2004 dismissed its subject as "sadly bereft of insight, compassion or wisdom" pejorative terms strangely similar to Dalrymple's critique. The author in question? VS Naipaul. He didn't respond. Will Naipaul be able to show such admirable self-restraint on this occasion? For the sake of good old-fashioned entertainment, I hope not..
