James Wood reveals why he goes easy on first-time novelists:
I pretty much started my career at The Guardian – it wasn’t the very first review I wrote but it was probably the first that made a name for me: a cruel review of a debut novelist, actually. And I think I was so young, and so ambitious myself to write, that it didn’t register that this was a first-time novelist. It was a first novel, and a pretty terrible novel and I was horrible about it. And who cares, really? Both the review and the novel have been long forgotten, but a few weeks later someone told me that the review had come out on the day of the author’s book launch, that she was in tears, and that it ruined the party. That’s a pretty horrible thing to hear. Nobody wants to be that person, and ever since it’s made me very wary. All the firepower has been concentrated on big names. Delillo’s strong enough to take it: Updike, Pynchon, Auster… I’ve always been tender on first time novelists.
The Dish 