GD: They’re unbelievably irritating. I’m always struck by the mistakes and errors and the poor quality of understanding.  Of course, I’d much rather be stroked than smacked; I’m a toddler to that extent still. But I might as well say this because it’s true: reviews remind me of what a good critic I am.

MC: You wrote a great response to Julian Barnes latest novel, The Sense of an Ending.

GD: I read it because everyone was saying how great it was and as I read it I was thinking, ‘God, they got this wrong.’  When it won the Booker Prize, I thought, ‘Somebody has to speak up.’

MC: Regarding Sense of an Ending, you write: “I didn’t get the book when I first read it. I still didn’t get it when I reread it… If such a thing is possible, I didn’t get it even more than I hadn’t got it first time around.” Say more about what it means to get a book?

GD: When you get a book, you see how things are done.  You see how effects are achieved.  There were some really moronic reviews on Amazon about Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.  The standard argument was that Dyer is so brain-addled, so finished, he couldn’t come up with one book, so he tried to palm off two completely different books.  But Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi needs to be read at least one and a half times so that all the connections become apparent.  What I mean by getting a book, is noticing stuff, stuff that’s going on in the prose.  Just stuff.

MC: I don’t think I get it. 

GD: Get what?

MC: You’re just interested in the machinations of a book?

GD: No, no.  I’m interested in psychological penetration. In fiction writing there needs to be a suppleness of observation going on.  I respond to the extent to which the writer has that ability.  Someone like Hollinghurst, he’s an incredible noticer of stuff—not just noticing that the bricks over there are…yellow or whatever, but also the psychological penetration that he has.