Terry McMillan probably has, too. Peck described "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" as "the most lazily written book I've ever read."

Dale Peck has been described as "the Michael Ovitz of the literary world," and reading "Hatchet Jobs" (New Press, $23.95), a collection of his reviews published this week, it's not hard to see why. He may be a pointy-headed intellectual, but he wields his axe with the vigor of a medieval knight.

In the course of a single paragraph, he manages to dismiss David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggers, Donald Antrim, Jonathan Franzen, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, and William Gaddis, not to mention "the incomprehensible ramblings" of William Faulkner and "the diarrheic flow" of James Joyce.

Such impassioned rants are virtually unheard of in the genteel arena of book reviewing, so it's not surprising that this alumnus of the Columbia graduate writing program has become almost as famous in the literary world as the authors he attacks.

At the 2002 National Book Awards, Steve Martin got the biggest laugh when he said, "If anyone applauds before everyone has been announced, they will be reviewed by Dale Peck."

Peck's take-no-prisoners attitude has earned him the antipathy of virtually the entire literary establishment.

Sven Birkerts - a rival critic and the subject of a 35-page essay in "Hatchet Jobs" - has said that, in his view, Peck was a vainglorious attention-seeker. "It just seems to me that if you're going to be in it for the big run, you have to act responsibly," he harrumphed.

Peck's detractors - and they include almost every writer he's ever reviewed - claim the reason he's so negative about other people's work is that his own career as a novelist failed to take off.

He's the author of three novels, none of which has exactly set the world on fire.

Peck denies the charge that he's motivated by resentment. "There may well be writers whose success I envy on some level, but I don't think that's why I wrote the reviews in 'Hatchet Jobs,'" he says. "I just didn't like those books."

As for the claim that he's just trying to draw attention to himself, he says, "I think that anybody who thinks you write book reviews to get attention in this world needs to look at the Paris Hilton sex tape."

Peck's defenders claim that the reason his criticism is so over the top is because he cares so much about the state of the novel.

"I wrote those reviews because that's how I feel, and I'm very angry at the state of contemporary literature," he says.

Peck doesn't simply want to take down the current generation of fashionable authors; he wants to reverse the entire direction in which literature has been headed since the 20th century began.

"I will say it once and for all, straight out: It all went wrong with Joyce," he writes in the afterword of "Hatchet Jobs."

"'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' is less a bildungsroman than the chapter-by-chapter unraveling of a talent which, if 'The Dead' is any indication, could have been formidable."

The solution, he believes, is to knock the giants of modernism and post-modernism off their pedestals.

"Sometimes even I am overwhelmed by the extent of the re-evaluations I'm calling for," he exclaims: "the excision from the canon, or at least the demotion in status, of most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo."

Within the church of American letters, this is out-and-out heresy, so it's hardly surprising that the high priests of this cult want to burn Peck at the stake.

Yet, prophets are rarely acclaimed in their own land. Perhaps, sometime in the not-too-distant future, Dale Peck will be regarded not as a heretic, but a hero.

Toby Young is the author of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People."