John Le Carré may be a fine novelist, but he’s so anti-American that even NPR felt compelled to ask him about it in a recent interview. (Le Carré shrugged it off.) Here’s the final graf in Jonathan Yardley’s review of Le Carré’s new book, A Most Wanted Man:
The anti-American note struck there is not new to le Carré — it has coursed through his work much as it did in the fiction of Graham Greene — but it is expressed in A Most Wanted Man with special virulence. No doubt this reflects the author’s opposition to innumerable aspects of recent American foreign policy, but he seems neither to know nor to care that many Americans share that opposition. The CIA people who crash onto the scene at the end are mere cartoons. Le Carré, who is capable of great subtlety and nuance, here is all bludgeon and righteous anger. It is not pretty to watch, and it diminishes him.