I find Vidal an utterly appalling character, an intellectual snob whose main skill is thinking up witty forms of personal abuse on the spot. Well, Ben Elton does it much better than him and isn’t a bitter old c…

http://www.nationalpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=483710

Michel Houellebecq, the shock-a-minute bad boy of the French book world, may have met his literary match in his own mother, who has penned a tell-all novel calling her son a “liar” and “parasite.” In his seminal 1998 novel Les particules elementaires Houellebecq vented a lifetime of anger against his mother, pictured, by portraying her as an egocentric, sexually promiscuous hippie who neglected her children. Now it’s payback time. Lucie Ceccaldi, 83, has published her own book, The Innocent One, in which she heaps insults on her son. “My son can go and get screwed by whomever he wants, he can write another book, I don’t give a toss,” she says in one excerpt. “But if he has the misfortune of sticking my name on anything again he’ll get my walking stick in his face and that’ll knock his teeth out,” she says in what newspapers described as a typical sample.