A smackdown in the Letters section of the June 23, 2005 New York Review of Books:
To the Editors:
I don’t agree with John Banville’s judgment that “Saturday is a dismayingly bad book” [NYR, May 26], and I have to wonder whether we are reading the same book (has the American edition, perhaps, been modified from that published in the UK in January by Jonathan Cape?).
Banville writes: “Perowne goes on to his squash game, which he manages to win despite the fright he has endured and the punch in the sternum that Baxter delivered him.” And later, “having thrashed his squash opponent, Perowne returns to the arts of peace.”
In the squash game, as published in the UK, at seventeen pages’ length, Perowne loses.
John Sutherland
Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus
Department of English
University College, LondonJohn Banville replies:
Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia. I have no knowledge of, and care nothing for, the game of squash. Having read Ian McEwan’s description of the match between Perowne and his American friend, all seventeen pages of it, I formed the notion that after a shaky start, and despite his experiences in the morning–traffic accident, encounter with thug, punch in the chest, etc.–Perowne managed to outplay his opponent, who, however, deprived him of what he clearly considered a victory by demanding a let or somesuch–as I say, I am ignorant in these matters, and McEwan’s account of the game made me no wiser, due no doubt to my sluggish comprehension rather than his powers of description. Perowne seemed to regard his opponent’s maneuver as not cheating, exactly, but certainly a less than generous broadening of a very fine line, although he did grudgingly consent to go on playing and lost, something which obviously meant more to him than it did to me. One concludes that there are no moral victories in sport, an activity which, as in a letter to an editor, it is easy to score by a technicality.
He’d have been better off sticking to his last point (i.e., ‘there’s not much substantive in your letter, old stick’) without what almost appears to be an avoidance of the fact that rather misunderstood the fact from the book which he (as quoted) used in his condemnatory review.
Something along the lines (suitably wittily embellished) of ‘I was wrong, but the bulk of what I said still stands, and you suck for not writing anything more substantive in your letter’ would have been more entertaining.