How do you get to be a literary critic?
Here’s this guy named Wilson dishing out a left-handed compliment to Agatha Christie–on the cover of one of her books, no less.
Who are these “obviously greater writers” that couldn’t do what Agatha Christie did? I’m sorry to say it, but reading Henry James is a snooze-a-thon and Joyce Carol Oates never figured out how to finish a story. Just to drop two big names: I don’t read much Serious Mainstream Litterature.
Real classics don’t need literary critics to keep them alive. Ask any ten-year-old whose imagination was set on fire by Homer’s Odyssey.