“After so many years, we’ve finally spoken,” said Mr. Theroux. His decades-long friendship with Mr. Naipaul imploded some 15 years ago when he discovered that a copy of one of his novels, lovingly inscribed to Mr. Naipaul, had been put up for sale. Mr. Theroux was then inspired to write the poison-pen memoir “Sir Vidia’s Shadow.” “I just had an experience today with a capital E.”
The British press was less exultant, quickly pivoting from handshaking to handwringing over whether the great age of the literary feud was over. ?“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” a writer for The Guardian sighed of the Naipaul-Theroux dust-up, before giving a rather wan list of still-simmering conflicts.
Certainly, some of the most famous literary feuds have recently passed into history. In 2007, the mysterious 30-year feud between Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, which involved a black eye and something about Mr. Vargas Llosa’s wife, seemed to abate when Mr. Vargas Llosa allowed a laudatory essay he had written about “Hundred Years of Solitude” to be republished in a 40th-anniversary edition of Mr. García Márquez’s famed novel. ?When Norman Mailer died later that year, he no doubt claimed a technical knockout over the many adversaries who had preceded him to the grave.
Even Rick Moody and Dale Peck, who infamously called Mr. Moody “the worst writer of his generation” in a 2002 review, appeared together three years ago at a fund-raising event — albeit so that Mr. Moody could throw a pie in Mr. Peck’s face. (It was all in fun.)
That last twist was a particularly devastating blow to connoisseurs of the literary feud, which, in its classic form, has often depended on a willingness to throw actual punches along with verbal jabs. Tolstoy once challenged Turgenev to a duel. Mailer laid out his longtime nemesis Gore Vidal with a punch at a dinner party. (“Words fail Norman Mailer yet again,” Mr. Vidal retorted from his supine position.)
More recently, Richard Ford responded to a sarcastic review from Colson Whitehead by spitting on him at a party — an incident that gave feud watchers hope that the old-fashioned literary barroom brawl hadn’t gone entirely out of style. (“I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford,” Mr. Whitehead later responded.)
If the literary feud has lost its old-school bluster, it might be tempting to lay the blame with what Nathaniel Hawthorne might have called “the mob of damn Twittering women.” These days, in America at least, it’s women authors who seem to start the splashiest literary fights, and you don’t need a stool at the White Horse Tavern to witness it.
Last fall, the novelists Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult led a Twitter campaign against what they saw as the male-dominated literary establishment’s excessive fawning over Jonathan Franzen, gathered under the hashtag #Franzenfreude.
More recently, a similar crew took aim at Jennifer Egan, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” after she dismissed most “chicklit” — to use a term that itself risks starting a fight — as “very derivative, banal stuff.”
In March, the novelist Ayelet Waldman wrote a series of posts to Twitter blasting the critic Katie Roiphe for including Ms. Waldman’s husband, Michael Chabon, in an essay she had written months earlier impugning the sexual swagger of the current crop of leading American male novelists.
Some feud watchers, however, question whether Twitter feuds really qualify. After all, how personal can things really be when the combatants have never met, and all the volleys are essentially open letters, ostensibly directed at a group of self-selected followers but there for all the world to see?
Ms. Roiphe, for one, says that social-media tools don’t do much to advance the sport. Twitter feuds “get sillier a lot more easily,” she said. “The nature of Twitter is you don’t need to think about what you’re saying. Most of us need to think more about what we’re saying, not less.”
Then again, perhaps no one exemplifies the sorry state of literary invective more than Mr. Naipaul himself, who a few days after burying the hatchet with Mr. Theroux tried to pick a fight with Jane Austen, who has been dead for nearly 200 years.
In comments quoted by The Guardian on Thursday, Mr. Naipaul dismissed all women writers as his inferiors, trashing Austen in particular for her “sentimental view of the world.” (He also lamented that his own publisher had become a writer of “feminine tosh,” adding, “I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”)
The singer Roseanne Cash, creator of the popular Twitter hashtag #JaneAustenAtTheSuperBowl blasted back with a post adapted from “Northanger Abbey”: “If Mr. Naipaul takes no pleasure in the happy delineation of the varieties of human nature, then he must be intolerably stupid.”
As to whether Jane herself would have indulged Sir Vidia in the feud he seemed to be bruising for, her admirers seemed to agree that he might have had better luck insulting Ashton Kutcher.?“Austen might have eviscerated the egotistical (if brilliant) Naipaul with a single excessively polite remark, but I doubt she’d have Tweeted it,” Ayelet Waldman wrote in an e-mail. “Only those of us with impulse control issues take our snits into the ether.”
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