Book reviewers are, on the whole, a polite bunch, and rarely say what they really think. Instead they use a clever code, whereby “her most experimental novel yet” means “an utter
mess”, “exhaustive and scholarly” = “I fell asleep”, “draws heavily on previous studies” = “the scoundrel has copied and pasted his entire
book”, and so on.
Occasionally, however, a critic will lose it, and bludgeon their victim so violently they can only be identified by dental records. We love it when this happens, which is why we’ve rounded up
this month’s best hatchet jobs:
Rod Liddle (Sunday Times) on Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones:
“The author, an Oxford graduate from Stockport, has based it upon this demonstrably false premise, that working-class equals chav. And that, further to this, the deployment of the word
“chav” is part of a conspiracy by the ruling class and especially the Tories to keep the lower orders in their place … Yes, this is a book written by the bastard offspring of
Private Eye’s Dave Spart and Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, a sustained rant devoid of nuance and wit, one part Socialist Worker editorial and one part undergrad history
essay.”
John Sweeney (Literary Review) on The Psychopath
Test by Jon Ronson:
“This is a Dalek-brainfry-up of a book, a fuzzy and incoherent attack on psychiatry without proper evidence. Given his generosity, cleverly modulated but consistent, towards the Church of
Scientology for its questioning of how mental illness is diagnosed in the Western world, you end up being sceptical about the quality of his scepticism.”
Camilla Long (Sunday Times) on With the
Kisses of His Mouth by Monique Roffey:
“For a book that is meant to be about learning, sharing and sexual development, Roffey comes across as surprisingly selfish and supremely self-absorbed, slaloming from episode to episode
with little thought for the reader: the literary equivalent of the worst shag in the world … By the end of the book this reader felt overexposed, puzzled, violated, short-changed; a used latex
glove.”
Leo Robson (New Statesman) on Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick:
“Perhaps the cruellest fate you could visit on any new novel would be to stand it next to Henry James’s much-loved and equally loathed late novel The Ambassadors. But Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, which invites the comparison, looks especially hunched, flimsy and knock-kneed … It emphasises, by way of contrast, the earlier book’s ingenuity, shrewdness and joy.”
Nirpal Dhaliwal (Evening Standard) on Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga:
“… a laborious and needless read … His method of characterisation is that of the Bollywood movie: simplistic, binary and cartoonish … I can only imagine this appeals
to Western matrons, who read this guff at bedtime before closing their eyes and dreaming of Art Malik.”
Anna Baddeley is the editor of The Omnivore, a website that aggregates press reviews of books, films and plays and offers alternative opinions.
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