"Gore Vidal, who’s had his dick sucked more than a few times and been taken to task for it, has written far more persuasively that the novel as an art-form has become a cultural irrelevance, but you don’t hear him whingeing about ‘artistic invalidation’."

It's not too often that I see words like 'tentacular' and 'bathos' in the same article as phrases about metaphorical dick-sucking (see above).

More seriously, I've been getting more into literature and literary critique recently, and am a bit surprised about how personally affronted he seems by the book - is this sort of reaction common in literary criticism?