Occasionally my friends mock me. There are plenty of reasons why they do so but one among many is that I sometimes make pronouncements on a book without having gone to the bother of actually reading the thing. It’s not that I haven’t done some research–I might have read the opinions of quite a few critics before voicing my own. Of course, in the eyes of many, relying on critics to inform you about the value of something is actually more risible than basing your opinion on absolute ignorance.But critics can save you time and effort.For example, I’ve always thought that the novels of John Irving were pretty awful without subjecting myself to the experience of reading them. Reviews of his work have usually tipped me off that his latest breezeblock should not be approached. And on the evidence of a profile of the author on BBC4 I saw the other night, I’m not going to rush out to buy his latest 800-pager. First, there was his statement that he doesn’t consider himself an artist, rather a “craftsman.” This faux humility made me think of the character of Gwyn Barry (no relation) from Martin Amis’s The Information. Barry, who is both talentless and a bestselling writer, goes to trouble of proving his kinship with the anonymous artisan by installing a carpentry workshop, complete with fake homemade furniture, in his west London mansion. If you’re going to be ego-maniacal enough to push your writing into the public sphere (and particularly if you’re as prolix as Irving), you should at least be honest and admit that what you’re doing has nothing in common with building a wardrobe.In addition, when Irving namechecks Charles Dickens as a model you know you should be suspicious. Here’s a rule of thumb: Bad novelists with pretensions always claim Dickens as their hero.But most importantly (I won’t get into Irving’s sweaty Papa Hemingway obsession with wrestling), there is Irving’s prose style, which is, based on the extracts he read on the programme, execrable. He read from A Prayer for Owen Meany, which features the gimmick whereby the protagonist’s distinctive voice is rendered by using ALL CAPS. This strikes me as the textual equivalent to running your fingernails down a blackboard. But one clanger struck my ear like the blast from an airhorn–Irving writes of Meany’s grandmother describing the young boy as looking like “an embryonic fox”. Faced with this phrase, which would be pounced on in a freshman creative writing class (“How many unborn foxes has the woman seen, exactly?), all you can do is cry, Meany-like, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ON ABOUT?