There’s always room for one more on the Ship of Fools, and Tom McCarthy has just booked his passage. The English novelist (no, I’d never heard of him, either) has written a column of such fifth-form puerility in the Guardian that it marks him down as a dunce of exceptional plumage. Make way, Hadley Freeman. Step aside, Zoe Williams. There’s a chap out there who can give you five yards and still beat you to the tape.
McCarthy, of Dulwich College and Oxford (just right for the Guardian), is in a frightful bate because he has been invited to a bash at the Royal Academy to celebrate British art and feels insulted: ‘Like all English-language writers, I’m thoroughly European’. To prove it he refers to Shakespeare and Joyce, who, like him, would have voted to remain part of the European Union.
There are the usual clichés one expects from a man who read Derrida and Barthes when he was in short pants, and never got over it: cross-pollination, intersections, culture – shaping innovators.
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