Lionel Shriver v Cynthia Ozick: hurrah for the new literary beef

The books world was growing worryingly well-mannered, but Ozick’s response – in verse – to a bad review by Shriver has revived the fine art of feuding

Whether it is Henry Fielding mocking Samuel Richardson’s painfully virtuous Pamela with his spoof, Shamela; Lillian Hellman suing Mary McCarthy for millions of dollars over her quip that “every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”; or Norman Mailer knocking Gore Vidal to the floor at a party (“Once again words fail Norman Mailer,” remarked Vidal), there is little more cheering than a good literary feud.

But it’s been a while since a proper throwdown. Richard Ford famously shot an Alice Hoffman book and posted it to her after she wrote a bad review of his book (“It’s not like I shot her,” he told the Guardian in 2003), and spat at The Underground Railway author Colson Whitehead over a similar offence, but Ford has lately refrained from such behaviour. Tom Wolfe’s death in 2018 put paid to his long-running and gloriously vituperative beef with John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving. (Irving is now the only survivor from that contretemps: does that mean he wins?)