• Courtesy of Charlie Rose
  • Garry Wills

British essayist Clive James ruefully observed in Sunday’s New York Times that America’s only serious cultural deficiency is its lack of “hostile literary criticism.” By way of example of what there’s not nearly enough of, he offered his own 1977 review in the New York Review of Books of John Le Carré‘s The Honorable Schoolboy. It was “undoubtedly a hatchet job,” James allowed, though not written to harm Le Carré, merely to have “fun” by picking out the book’s “absurdities and pomposities.” Le Carré was not amused, James allowed: Le Carré “had never had a really bad review in his life until I ambushed him in America.” But of course both were British—the NYRB just happened to be the corral where he slapped leather.

The Honorable Schoolboy was the middle installment of Le Carré’s “Karla trilogy.” The first and last of those three books—Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People—were adapted to television to great acclaim by the BBC, with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Schoolboy wasn’t. It was some 160 pages longer than either of its companions, a heftiness James’s hatchet job took note of. “Generally the book has been covered with praise—a response not entirely to be despised, since The Honourable Schoolboy is so big that it takes real effort to cover it with anything,” he wrote. “At one stage I tried to cover it with a pillow, but there it was, still half visible, insisting, against all the odds posed by its coagulated style, on being read to the last sentence.”