There is nothing we like more than a literary hatchet job. It provides us with a pang of pleasure if the hatchet is wielded with particular force or precision, and it saves us having to read the execrable book left in a mangled heap on the reviewer's blood-spattered slab. When the author being dispatched is Salman Rushdie, not a writer assailed by self-doubt, we experience a special frisson.
Novelist Zoë Heller's review of Rushdie's fatwa memoir Joseph Anton in the New York Review of Books is being hailed as the hatchet job of the year. The latter used to be an honorific title, but is now a real prize offered by the Omnivore website. Heller is reckoned to be a shoo-in. In a review of 2,600 words, her opening is measured – a careful analysis of whether fiction can be offensive. Then: wham! She rounds on "the lordly nonchalance with which Rushdie places himself alongside Lawrence, Joyce and Nabokov in the ranks of literary merit". The second half of the review tears into his self-regard. "An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book," she writes.
Heller's review is not the first to attack Rushdie's memoir for its solipsism. AN Wilson made many of the same points in the Daily Telegraph when Joseph Anton was published in the UK in September. But the length of the review, the quality of the writing and the fact that it appeared in the New York Review of Books, bastion of quiet authority in a noisy world, give it added power. And the last sentence is a zinger. "The world is as large and as wide as it ever was; it's just Rushdie who got small."
Heller has form when it comes to hatchet jobs. She performed a similar disembowelling in September, when she reviewed Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography – "Wolf literally does not understand the meaning of 'literally' and her grasp of the scientific research she has read is pretty shaky too." If she carries on in this vein, she will be hailed as the new Dorothy Parker, whose judgment of Benito Mussolini's The Cardinal's Mistress – "this is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force" – remains the touchstone by which other hatchet wielders should be judged. But Heller should be careful, too. Today, Parker is remembered more for her vitriolic reviews than her poems or short stories. Hatchets are dangerous weapons, and not just for the victims.
