To celebrate the Hatchet Job of the Year Award, Rupert Hawksley doffs his cap to the writers whose poisoned barbs have hit home over the centuries
Christopher Hitchens vs Gore Vidal
James Wood on Zadie Smith (2002)
If America’s finest authors triumphed in the bitchiness stakes prior to the Millennium, the years following the turn of the century belong to their European counterparts who took to the task of quarrelling among themselves with admirable energy.
Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth, had received almost universal acclaim in 2000 but her follow up, The Autograph Man, failed to match that effort and in The London Review of Books James Wood wasted no time in putting the knife in and giving it a hefty twist.
"Its central character, Alex-Li Tandem, is a dreary blank, an empty centre entirely filled by his pop-culture devotions. Around him swirls a text incapable of ever stiffening into sobriety, a flailing, noisy hash of jokes, cool cultural references, pull-quotes, lists and roaring italics. It is like reading a newspaper designed by a kindergarten."
John Banville on Ian McEwan (2009)
Ian McEwan is held in such high esteem as to be considered a national treasure - almost untouchable. Enter John Banville who singled out McEwan’s novel, Saturday, for a savaging in The New York Review of Books.
"Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?"
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