"A craven little shit"
That's what BS Johnson called Anthony Thwaite, the reviewer of the new biography, who also reviewed one of Johnson's novels and so provoked the said abuse. (Thwaite, you might need reminding, is also the man who edited the original, very untidy edition of Larkin's collected poems).
He is probably right to say that Johnson's novels were "ham-fisted efforts with the experimental novel." They aren't that great, and, as Kate Figes observed, Johnson was really quite a conservative writer, with a few gimmicks. The works of better writers efface their "experimentalism" because it is intrinsic to the work itself.
In fact, there is something quite craven in that resort to the word "experimental". Why not just say "novel"?
