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…e saborear cada palavra:

«Mrs Gereth had said she would go with the rest to church, but suddenly it seemed to her that she should not be able to wait even till church-time for relief: breakfast, at Waterbath, was a punctual meal, and she had still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the church to be near, she prepared in her room for the little rural walk, and on her way down again, passing through corridors and observing imbecilities of decoration, the æsthetic misery of the big commodious house, she felt a return of the tide of last night’s irritation, a renewal of everything she could secretly suffer from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she consent to such contacts? why did she so rashly expose herself? She had had, heaven knew, her reasons, but the whole experience was to be sharper than she had feared. To get away from it and out into the air, into the presence of sky and trees, flowers and birds, was a necessity of every nerve. The flowers at Waterbath bath would probably go wrong in colour and the nightingales sing out of tune; but she remembered to have heard the place described as possessing those advantages that are usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough it clearly didn’t possess. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wallpaper in her room; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow’s weeds she rustled across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the only person in the house incapable of wearing in her preparation the horrible stamp of the same exceptional smartness that would be conspicuous in a grocer’s wife. She would rather have perished than have looked endimanchée.»
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (1897; ed. Oxford World's Classics, 2000, p. 1)

(E tudo isto a propósito do temperamento e dos gostos pessoais na avaliação de uma obra literária. Tão maneirista, pedante e aristocrata, e no entanto um dos melhores de sempre – o Mestre.)

Apesar do carácter retórico da pergunta, Sérgio, ensaio uma resposta: claro que é.
A nossa (deles, americanos) estimável Michiko é insuportavelmente feminista e misândrica, maniqueísta, cultora do ódio de estimação (que o digam Roth ou Mailer, este último num qualquer tipo de manifestação ectoplásmica), talvez induzida pela soberba do legado para o mundo literário de uma marca própria; porém, sabe de literatura e de como se constrói uma recensão, disseca, por vezes com um excesso de minúcia, as obras analisadas. É irritante e de crítica na maioria das vezes criticável (pleonasmo propositado, não sei por que carga de água...), mas irrepreensível no rigor – não é por acaso que já venceu um Pulitzer pela carreira de recenseadora.
A nossa (e aqui, infelizmente, o possessivo assenta-nos bem) Dóris Graça Dias é a imagem do país. E porque é nele que temos de viver, onde um simples texto de lamentação, ao invés de agir como agente preventivo para um comportamento desprezível, é normalmente visto como uma apologia, então fiquemo-nos pelos adjectivos que, de forma inexorável, a ele se agarram como lapas às rochas: pequenino, mesquinho, invejoso e, sobretudo neste caso, oportunista – o velho hábito luso do massacre, constante e sem piedade, do debilitado –, um imenso viveiro para a ostentação, para o snobismo grosseiro (ver etimologia, sine nobilitate).