Just before Christmas five years ago, I spent an afternoon in the company of the novelist Zadie Smith and the literary critic James Wood (then of the New Republic, now of the New Yorker). I’d been asked by another magazine to oversee a conversation between Smith and Wood on “the future of the novel and the function of criticism”. The idea was that they would continue a public colloquy that had begun in 2002, after Wood wrote a withering and pitiless review of Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man.
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