James Wood, in his review of John Le Carré's Absolute Friends writes that the reason people see him as a literary novelist

may be that his books seem to reproduce on the political level what the great novelists are prized for doing on the human level. The complexity, the ambiguity, the command of moral grayness, the willingness to raise questions rather than answer them--these, at the level of character, are what the liberal humanist novel is supposed to do....

Later on, Wood argues that a great writer reveals something new, deep, or truthful. Anyway, it looks like he's so annoyed by Le Carré's strident anti-Americanism that he decides there's nothing about the book to like. I know how something like that can greatly reduce my pleasure in a work, but I still think he's being a little unfair.