“Pity V.S. Naipaul: every couple of years or so the dyspeptic writer makes a pronouncement so extreme that it sounds like a plea for attention, a desperate attempt to shock, yet he is so profligate with his scorn that he is nothing if not predictable. This time around, his target is the woman writer, a species whose work and ‘narrow’ concerns, he says, is ‘unequal to me’.” (He makes a special point of picking on Jane Austen.)