Banville on Saturday

Here is the famous review published in The New York Review of Books in which Banville tore apart one of the most talked about books of the year, Ian McEwan's Saturday. He ridicules McEwan by calling him a "story-teller" (of the fairy-tale variety) and calls his book "dismayingly bad":

Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.—are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew.

And here's an interesting exchange on the review with John Sutherland (he was the chief judge of this year's booker prize which Banville eventually won). McEwan's book wasn't even shortlisted.