Wow.. a complete literary smackdown..

Cheryl Miller puts the hammer of the Gods to Paul Fisher.

She attacks, rightly, the modern notion that it it useful to attribute all the sins a critic can find in their own head, onto the artists that they review. A sample passage of the review.

Fisher is convinced that he is on the cutting-edge of literary interpretation, that his “intimate portrait” of the Jameses is new. The introduction is full of such self-congratulation. “Few people talked or wrote about the most intimate issues in the Jameses’ lives: mental illness, alcoholism, love, sex, homosexuality, money”; “there has been little frank discussion about the Jameses in love,” etc., etc. Previous biographers might have done “superlative,” even “meticulous, monumental” work, but none of them is the bold slayer of myths our author claims to be.

And that is the polite bit!

She massacres this book so profoundly that it might actually cause me to purchase the thing to see the wreckage.

Marketing by assassination.

Fucking Brilliant!