Opinion #IHateMarquez

The British press was less exultant,quickly pivoting from handshaking to handwringing over whether the great age of the literary feud was over. Some of the most famous literary feuds have recently passed into history. In 2007,the mysterious 30-year feud between Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez,which involved a black eye and something about Vargas Llosa’s wife,seemed to abate when Vargas Llosa allowed a laudatory essay he had written about One Hundred Years of Solitude to be republished in a 40th-anniversary edition of García Márquez’s famed novel. When Norman Mailer died later that year,he no doubt claimed a technical knockout over the many adversaries who had preceded him to the grave.

Even Rick Moody and Dale Peck,who infamously called Moody “the worst writer of his generation” in a 2002 review,appeared together three years ago at a fund-raising event — albeit so that Moody could throw a pie in Peck’s face. (It was all in fun.)

That last twist was a particularly devastating blow to connoisseurs of the literary feud,which,in its classic form,has often depended on a willingness to throw actual punches along with verbal jabs. Tolstoy once challenged Turgenev to a duel. Mailer laid out his longtime nemesis Gore Vidal with a punch at a dinner party. (“Words fail Norman Mailer yet again,” Vidal retorted.)

More recently,Richard Ford responded to a sarcastic review from Colson Whitehead by spitting on him,giving feud watchers hope the old-fashioned literary barroom brawl hadn’t gone entirely out of style. (“I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho,in case of inclement Ford,” Whitehead responded.)

If the literary feud has lost its old-school bluster,it might be tempting to lay the blame with what Nathaniel Hawthorne might have called “the mob of damn Twittering women.” These days it’s women authors who seem to start the splashiest literary fights,and you don’t need a stool at the White Horse Tavern to witness it.

Novelists Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult led a Twitter campaign against what they saw as the male-dominated literary establishment’s excessive fawning over Jonathan Franzen,under the hashtag #Franzenfreude. Others took aim at Jennifer Egan,Pulitzer winner for A Visit From the Goon Squad,after she dismissed most “chicklit” — a term that itself risks starting a fight — as “very derivative,banal stuff.” Novelist Ayelet Waldman tweeted blasting the critic Katie Roiphe for including Waldman’s husband,Michael Chabon,in an essay she had written impugning the sexual swagger of the current crop of US male novelists.

Some feud watchers,however,question whether Twitter feuds really qualify. After all,how personal can things really be when the combatants have never met,and all the volleys are essentially open letters?

Roiphe says social media tools don’t do much to advance the sport. Twitter feuds “get sillier a lot more easily,” she said. “The nature of Twitter is you don’t need to think about what you’re saying. Most of us need to think more about what we’re saying,not less.”

Then again,no one exemplifies the sorry state of literary invective more than Naipaul himself,who a few days after burying the hatchet with Theroux tried to pick a fight with Jane Austen,dead for nearly 200 years. Naipaul dismissed all women writers as his inferiors,trashing Austen in particular for her “sentimental view of the world.” (He also lamented that his own publisher had become a writer of “feminine tosh,” adding,“I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”)

The singer Roseanne Cash,creator of the popular Twitter hashtag #JaneAustenAtTheSuperBowl blasted back with a post adapted from Northanger Abbey: “If Naipaul takes no pleasure in the happy delineation of the varieties of human nature,then he must be intolerably stupid.”

As to whether Jane herself would have indulged Sir Vidia in the feud he seemed to be bruising for,her admirers seemed to agree that he might have had better luck insulting Ashton Kutcher. “Austen might have eviscerated the egotistical (if brilliant) Naipaul with a single excessively polite remark,but I doubt she’d have Tweeted it,” Ayelet Waldman wrote in an e-mail. “Only those of us with impulse control issues take our snits into the ether.”