From John Freeman:

Several years ago, I had an editor at a newspaper who liked to go over copy by the phone. His edits could be brutal, but he always circled around with a palliative comment to remind me it was all in service of a bigger need. “Remember, John,” he would say, “this is for the guy out in the suburbs eating his corn flakes. He has about five minutes before it’s outside for some Sunday yard work. So you want to tell him something important.”

From Anthony Burgess’s You’ve Had Your Time:

John Coleman in the Spectator said: ‘Not the best of Burgess’s books. Mr. Burgess might curb his inventiveness: he’d be a first-rate comic novelist if the camouflage of another little joke were down and he looked his subject squarely in the face.’ R.G.G. Price in Punch wrote: ‘I do not quite understand why everybody refers to Mr. Burgess as a funny man. He is as accurate and depressing as Gissing, though I agree that he is a Gissing with a sense of fun and an eye for any comedy to be found in his ruined world.’ Do reviewers ever consider that novelists are desperate for help, that they are anxious to be told where they go wrong and what they can do to put things right, and that, before they achieve the dignity of solus reviews and academic dissertations, they have to rely on these lordly summations in the weekly press?

Rachel Cooke writes: “It wasn’t the hype that turned me off, nor the stories about how she’d been ignored as a novelist for years (Kevin was published by the small independent publisher, Serpent’s Tail); it was more that whenever she appeared in the newspapers, she seemed to be so… belligerent. Her book reviews were bordering on the vicious and in her byline picture, she wore a sleeveless denim shirt and matching frown that made me think I wouldn’t want to meet her late at night in a dark alley.”

When I talked with Lionel Shriver for an hour last month, I didn’t find her belligerent at all. She just doesn’t suffer fools gladly and is unafraid to speak her mind. I found her to be sharp, acerbic, and among one of the most fascinating people I’ve talked with this year. And I should also note that she answered every provocative question I put to her, even some of the half-baked ones.

Even so, I’m appalled that Shriver’s looks or manner would have any bearing upon whether her novel is any good. I don’t see book critics applying this kind of criteria to men. Why then should they dwell upon what an author photo has to do with an author’s work?

Then again, Rachel Cooke is the same person who was content to sling generalizations about bloggers. That Cooke is more willing to devote two paragraphs to being “Lionel Shriver’s number one fan” instead of offering specific examples on why The Post-Birthday World is an “unreadably plodding and obscure novel” says more about Cooke’s vapid literary standards than any sufficiently critical take on the book. If this is the kind of flimsy flummery that Cooke wishes to spew into the world, then she should be writing for Metro instead of The Observer.

(via Bill Peschel)