The second half of the review tears into his self-regard. Then: wham! She rounds on "the lordly nonchalance with which Rushdie places himself alongside Lawrence, Joyce and Nabokov in the ranks of literary merit". In a review of 2,600 words, her opening is measured – a careful analysis of whether fiction can be offensive. The latter used to be an honorific title, but is now a real prize offered by the Omnivore website. Novelist Zoë Heller's review of Rushdie's fatwa memoir Joseph Anton in the New York Review of Books is being hailed as the hatchet job of the year. When the author being dispatched is Salman Rushdie, not a writer assailed by self-doubt, we experience a special frisson. It provides us with a pang of pleasure if the hatchet is wielded with particular force or precision, and it saves us having to read the execrable book left in a mangled heap on the reviewer's blood-spattered slab. T here is nothing we like more than a literary hatchet job.
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