Wood on Smith

And if Smith is offering up her own novel as an example of the very corruption afflicting her characters, one would have to say that to poison a whole novel is a very lengthy way of making a point about a single modern germ. Besides, confession is not absolution. The identification of a problem is not necessarily a form of resistance to it, and may be only an easy complicity: this was exactly the moral structure of Rushdie’s trivia-tattooed novel, Fury, which posed as excoriation but was really a love letter to the society of spectacle.