Hatchet Jobs

[Liam]

I thought we could have a separate thread on some of those particularly nasty book-reviews you come across (often or not) online. Personally, I agree with Silverman that we need more negative reviews than positive mumbo-jumbo. If everyone likes everything, what is there to talk about? Anyway, this recent piece (granted, reviewing a title that I am not familiar with) had me in stitches.

[Liam]

When Negative Reviews Go Wrong

[Liam]

A Martin Amis Hatchet Job? On Lionel Asbo: State of England

[Flint]

Amis is one of those writers whose personal antics attract more attention than their writing. Personally, Amis's teeth, family life, political ideas... don't interest me at all.

The problem with Amis is something that has happened before to a lot of successful men: he is very good at one thing, and then he comes to think that he is very good at everything. He went to Oxford, and he is very well read in English language literature. He has produced some interesting criticism (The War Against Cliché), and he would have made a good literature teacher. As a writer of fiction, he has a comic gift, like his father - there are memorably comical moments in, for example, Dead Babies, although his humour tends to be nasty - the sort of humour based on someone getting humiliated or hurt, or both. All in all, he has written a promising novel (Success), a passably good one (Money), and a lot of worthless pretentious stuff.

As a political commentator, he knows very little, he has very simple, almost childish, ideas, and his self-confidence is endless - a perfect recipe for disaster.

Not to be taken seriously.