I had said in this column once that, “Michael Dirda has been America’s most engaging, energetic book critic.” A few days later Amitava Kumar emailed me to say, “I disagree slightly with your assessment of Dirda; I’d give that honour to the British-born, New York-based James Wood, who pushes up the stakes in this business like nobody else. Unlike Dirda, his readings of someone like Updike is demanding and to my mind utterly persuasive. I’d like to argue a bit more strenuously in favour of Wood.” I wrote back saying I wholeheartedly agreed with him.

Pradeep Sebastian in the Hindu begins his column–a review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works–by invoking my somewhat polemical praise in a message I sent him some years ago.

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