In the USA, many critics aim to entertain rather than simply report. And if they don’t like a book, they will tear it to shreds. The most celebrated ‘hatchet man’ is the novelist Dale Peck, who reviews books for the Village Voice Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review.

Peck did not enjoy the cloistered, educated upbringing of many critics. His mother died when he was three years old; his father was an alcoholic Long Island plumber who beat up his son after finding out that he was gay.

Today, Dale Peck is known as ‘The Takedown Artist’. For him, the modernist tradition

...began with the diarrhoeic flow of words that is Ulysses, continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov, and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth, Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid - just plain stupid - tomes of DeLillo.

In the small, intricately-networked world of the New Zealand literary scene, such aggressive criticism would cause more than whispered mutterings. One can’t imagine a high-profile Kiwi critic claiming that

novels and memoirs are on a wrong course. They are either inward-gazing, solipsistic and impotent or unconscious and rarefied, written by recidivist realists who pretend the twentieth century didn't happen.

In last Sunday’s Observer, Kate Kellaway wrote a very interesting article about Dale Peck. You can read it here.