On A New Statesman critique of Beckett's novel, The Unnameable

"That is really the point of The Unnameable, whose demands on the reader seem, at times, to approach the demands it must have made on its author (the popularity of Beckett studies at universities around the world is testimony not only to the inexhaustible richness of his oeuvre but also to the feeling that only people with nothing else whatsoever to do with their lives would be able to digest, sift through and evaluate everything he has written); and it is not so much that Beckett shot his bolt with it that makes his subsequent work so (mercifully) short as that concision was the only possible subsequent artistic course that would have allowed him to continue with integrity."

(From www.newstateman.com)

This paragraph's savage humor goes way beyond damning Beckett by faint praise or even attributing to Beckett a bad eminence. Does anyone else read in this paragraph a series of jokes against the author?

Can it be anything other than a joke to claim that The Unnameable was such a failure that it constitutes nothing more than an APOLOGY for everything Beckett afterwards wrote.