A passionate and very vocal minority of reviewers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads seems to find the story an affront not just to literature but to humanity itself. “Most disgusting book ever,” said one. “One star or five, there is no middle ground,” declared another. “The Nazis would have loved it,” one man raged, proving that everything up to and including beloved children’s picture books will eventually fall prey to Godwin’s Law — that as an online discussion grows, so does the likelihood that someone or something will be compared to a Nazi.

The boy uses the tree as a plaything, lives off her like a parasite, and then, when she’s a shell of her former self and no longer serves any real purpose, he sits on her — which makes her happy? (“That book is the epitome of male privilege,” a friend groused.)

“I don’t want to hold the tree accountable,” she continued, but she thinks there could have been a happier ending: “If only she’d set limits, she wouldn’t be a stump today!”

(“If what we’re doing is so good,” the commandant wonders, “why does it smell so lancingly bad?”)

Amis’s great gift is a corrosively satiric voice, often very funny, zestfully profane, obscene, and scatological.

The author’s rage at Holocaust horrors is portioned into scenes and sentences; it does not gather into a powerful swell, to overwhelm or terrify.

But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.

The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men?

To-day even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise.