Lashing Out At Lahiri

In his Nation review of Zadie Smith's On Beauty (which he finds lacking in restraint and form), William Deresiewicz takes a sudden and gratuitous detour to lash out at Jhumpa Lahiri's output:

“[Interpreter of Maladies’] nine stories exhibit a high degree of competence, but it's the kind of competence that makes you want to call for the abolition of writing programs (not to mention the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted--no, machine-tooled--to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices--the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany--arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class.”