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Simon Baker

Thursday, 28th September 2006

If you are a fairly successful writer, among the privileged ten per cent or so, your novels are reviewed. If, however, you are a superlatively successful one, often considered to be the voice of a generation, then such is the level of interest that even your reviews are reviewed. The following, from John Sutherland’s recent book, How to Read a Novel, concerns a now famous evocation by Tibor Fischer in his review of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003):

The abuse (it could hardly be called literary criticism) was published in the Daily Telegraph and widely reprinted, creating less a pre- emptive strike than a kicking to death of a novel in the womb … Somehow the image of the uncle wanking in the schoolyard was unexpungeable.

Martin Amis’s fame as a novelist is such that the lexical equivalent of a Russian doll exists around his work; I am a critic referring to the comments of a critic on the comments of a critic on the merits of a novel.

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