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Not everyone enjoys his style, however. Critics who dislike Banville’s idiom include novelist Tibor Fischer, who titled his review of Banville’s novel The Sea, “Wave after wave of vocabulary.“ More scathingly, Jessica Winter in The Village Voice wrote, “Banville's famously torrid affair with his thesaurus has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters, whose fierce powers of observation and description are rendered poignantly meaningless by failings of moral temperament, but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody.”

When Banville was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize for The Sea, John Sutherland, chairman of the prize committee, defended the choice: “A recurrent objection is that the language gets in the way of the story (what story?). But couldn't one say the same thing about Ulysses?”

Banville’s wordy style may actually be functional: one reviewer argues that words act as a consolation to The Sea's grieving hero, Max Morden. As an enrichment or a consolation to readers, a glossary of the more arcane words in The Sea is available.