The Omnivore

We were deeply distressed to read about this new “Hatchet Job of the Year Award” in last Wednesday’s Guardian. We’re all for promoting literary criticism (who isn’t?) but really, to award a prize for bitchiness – as if those damned critics needed any encouragement! Authors spend years pouring their heart and soul into their manuscripts and to ridicule them in public is just gratuitously cruel, especially when they are part-Trinidadian. As for the fishy prize – what’s that all about?

So, on behalf of all you lovers of literature and fairness out there, we’ve had a stab at redressing the balance. Here, mercifully free of any buttery crustaceans or “celebrity” judging panel, is the shortlist for The Omnivore Award for Bloody Decent Book Reviews:

Find out more about the Hatchet Job of the Year Award 2011.

Danielle Chapman on THE BEES by Carol Ann Duffy, Financial Times … not only an expert ear but a keenly feeling one … her penchant for place-names and slang, her roguish sense of humour, and her elegiac impulse combine into a public voice that is genuinely celebratory, though with an undercurrent of mournfulness and an ironic edge.

Toby Clements on THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes, Telegraph Barnes is on absolutely top form here. His sentences, each one so simple and precise, are as iridescent as tropical fish, each one individual and distinct, each one expressing a single revelatory insight, thought, image or joke, and yet they work together to produce a perfectly wonderful harmonious shoal, a work of rare and dazzling genius.

Julie Myerson on WITH THE KISSES OF HIS MOUTH by Monique Roffey, Guardian … a candid exploration of the vulnerability of middle-age … It is astoundingly brave. It is funny. It speeds along. It has magic at its heart — that indefinable sliver of human warmth and hope that all the best, most searching memoirs seem to have.

Sarah Vine on HONEY MONEY by Catherine Hakim, The Times Her scorn for the way the sexual revolution has undermined women’s sexual power by devaluing it, and how ideals of free love have been more sexually enslaving to women — not less — is clearly and convincingly argued … full of intellectual nourishment

Christopher Hart on ROME by Robert Hughes, Sunday Times If visiting Rome, you should certainly take this passionate, erudite bruiser’s Baedeker with you — a superbly rich blend of history, art and travelogue.

The Economist on CLAVICS by Geoffrey Hill A collection that delights in eccentric incongruities. Ben Jonson will appear a line after a popular instant coffee blend has been mentioned, Dante will be found next to a mime artist, Marcel Marceau, and Lawes himself figures auditioning for Ronnie Scott … This discordance is part of his wider belief in the public nature of poetry. Refusing to be a “light entertainer” like the hypocrites in Dante’s inferno, Mr Hill presents a difficult world as he sees it. His gift lies in making such difficulty momentarily understood.

Jeanette Winterson on BY NIGHTFALL by Michael Cunningham, New York Times His dialogue is deft and fast. The pace of the writing is skilled — stretched or contracted at just the right time. And if some of the interventions on art are too long — well, too long for whom? For what? Good novels are novels that provoke us to argue with the writer, not just novels that make us feel magically, mysteriously at home. A novel in which everything is perfect is a waxwork. A novel that is alive is never perfect.

D.J. Taylor on MARTIN AMIS: THE BIOGRAPHY by Richard Bradford, Independent Three things redeem the book, to the point where it becomes very good indeed. The first is the rambunctious presence of Christopher Hitchens … The second is Bradford’s skill at re-animating the cultural circles in which Mart flourished during his early London period … The third is his provocative readings of many of the novels.

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Despite rave reviews from across the Atlantic, and Harbuch’s reported $650,000 advance, THE ART OF FIELDING didn’t Omniscore a home run. Some critics were determined not to be overawed by the latest contender for the title of The Great American Novel. Jonathan Beckman in the Literary Review thought the book slightly affected:

Practically every attempt at atmospherics ends disastrously: ‘the plane’s propellers pureed the air’; ‘The pumpkin sun had impaled itself on the spire of Westish Chapel and begun to bleed’ and, my favourite, ‘Shreds of cloud blew past the setting sun, causing shadows to scurry rodentially over the grass.’ I’m convinced that Chad Harbach has lifted that ‘rodentially’ from David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘The String Theory’, in which tennis player Thomas Enqvist is described as looking ‘eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain … with that narrow sort of rodentially patrician quality’. The essay is one of only three citations of the word in the OED and DFW’s work is a touchstone of Harbach. It takes ears of burlap, however, not to recognise that this unusual adverb, which works in a comically compressed sketch, sounds utterly inappropriate here.

The book is tormented by a constant anxiety to prove its own literary genealogy, clearly worried that it might otherwise be mistaken for soap opera.

But he  did admit that the “goofy novel is compulsively readable”.

All reviews here.

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Want to know what the critics made of the latest book, film or play? The Omnivore rounds up newspaper reviews, bringing you a cross section of critical opinion. Sign up to our newsletter.