From the issue dated June 4, 2004
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Pecked to Death
As a literary type, the savage critic dates back almost to the Big Bang. Nasty caveman snots undoubtedly started throwing things before cave paintings even dried (they didn't call it the Stone Age for nothing). With a little scholarly push, some brilliant classicist could probably unearth the name of the Corinthian creep who declared, just after reading a galley of The Iliad: "People will realize someday that this is nothing but a Brad Pitt vehicle." Without savage criticism, particularly misguided invective from giants toward giants, we'd lack the passion over quality, and certainty of literary subjectivity, we treasure. "A cliché anthologist ... and maker of ragamuffin manikins," opined Aristophanes of Euripides, who survived the pan. Ben Jonson thought Shakespeare should have "blotted a thousand" of his lines. Emerson found Jane Austen's novels "vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world," and Twain similarly declared her "unreadable." When both savager and savaged remain literary luminaries, we smile at the judgments, even the wicked, such as Wilde's squib on George Meredith: "As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist, he can do everything except tell a story." But when critics remain mere critics, mediocrities lost to history, we find the condemnations more troubling or outrageous. Eugene Poitou's judgment on Balzac in 1856 is perhaps merely pathetic -- "Little imagination is shown in invention, in the creating of character and plot, or in the delineation of passion." Yet James Lorimer's verdict on Wuthering Heights (1847) in the North British Review, that "it will never be generally read" because it "magnified a thousand fold" the faults of Jane Eyre by the author's sister, angers one in its harsh insensitivity to both Emily Brontë's achievement and her feelings. So, too, in light of Melville's critical fate during his lifetime, one might sizzle at William Harrison Ainsworth's description of Moby Dick (1851) in Harper's New Monthly Magazine as "a huge dose of hyperbolic slang, maudlin sentimentalism and tragic-comic bubble and squeak." Those impulses suggest that our attitudes toward the savage literary critic depend partly on whether he or she is 100-percent critic or a major novelist/poet. One tradition eternally derides professional critics as a "most stupid and malignant race" (Shelley), second-raters who "have failed in literature and art" (Disraeli), mere "brushers of noblemen's clothes" (George Herbert). The other, promoted by practitioners like Sainte-Beuve, praises the critic as someone "whose watch is five minutes ahead of other people's watches," a "secretary of the public who does not wait to take dictation, ... who divines, who decides, who expresses every morning what everybody is thinking." The notion persists in the late Pauline Kael's description of the critic as the "only independent source of information. The rest is advertising." The case of Dale Peck, whose Hatchet Jobs arrives this month from the New Press, should be judged within the crosscurrents of those powerful legacies. Over the past few years, the 36-year-old novelist and critic has earned a niche as the most savage and "snarky" (in the buzzword of the moment) American book reviewer, thanks to prominent play in The New Republic and a fame-guaranteeing magazine profile in The New York Times. The profile began with three excerpts of Peck's style as epigraphs: Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation. [Sven] Birkerts trots out all his allusions and factlets and trivia, regardless of accuracy, relevance, or extraneousness, with the tinkling insistence of a 5-year-old learning to play "Chopsticks." Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back is the most lazily written book I've ever read ... a panting, gasping, protracted death rattle: 400 pages of unpunctuated run-on sentences about virtually nothing. Those assaults only hint at the incessant hyperbole and sweeping denunciation throughout Hatchet Jobs, which sandwiches 12 of Peck's essay-reviews between a manifesto-like preface and afterword. Birkerts's memoir is "deceitful and self-serving." The genre of the memoir is a "dung heap." Joyce's Ulysses is "a hoax upon literature." Thomas Pynchon's 30-year writing career "hasn't produced a single memorable or even recognizably human character." Raymond Carver's work is "awful." The highly acclaimed novels of Jim Crace show their author to be "ignorant of anything written during the twentieth century." David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is "800 pages of crap" (though, somehow, Wallace is also "a very good writer indeed"). Julian Barnes's Love, Etc. offers "two hundred dull pointless pages" (though somehow Barnes is a "terribly, terribly skilled writer" and "a clever craftsman"). Go figure. Will Peck's earlier publication of three respectfully received novels, and a quasi-memoir of his own, protect him against the animus toward lesser writers who scourge more-successful ones? He himself declares that Hatchet Jobs marks his "final foray into negative book reviewing." He's ostensibly quitting because "people were less interested in what I (or the writers I'd reviewed) had to say than in the possibility of a brawl." Could it also be that he's worried by his critical stardom as a vicious reviewer eclipsing his modest reputation as a novelist? The betting here is that Hatchet Jobs will sink Peck permanently as both critic and novelist, the latter demise ensuing because he's squandered enough good will to keep five midlist literary novelists afloat. To a reader often abroad in recent years who missed the Peck hoopla, the surprise of Hatchet Jobs is how consistently bad these essays are. Why did editors permit so much juvenile name-calling to be published as serious criticism? Academic literary scholars will recognize Peck instantly as a familiar sort of mediocre graduate student: the A student from a B undergraduate institution who learned, in an uncompetitive environment, that glibly flagging and sizing up literary figures in a cocky tone won kudos and constituted superior performance among undistinguished peers. Except for an occasional insight or welcome jaunty phrase, Peck's essays uniformly lack the virtues of first-rate criticism: clear argument, shrewd use of evidence, consistency in criteria, inventive language, and a coherent critical philosophy that's more than a bent for screaming at people. Whether it's gay literature, black literature, or an individual writer like Julian Barnes, Peck's whole critical approach appears to be: I'd have written this book differently, so it "sucks" (his favored verb). The Peck recipe for an essay? A potful of plot summary, plus a sprinkling of scattershot remarks. Space constraints do not permit a full count of Peck's sins, but a short list is mandatory: hypocrisy, inconsistency, jealousy, contemptuousness, hyperbole, repetitiveness, self-consciousness, pretentiousness. Peck mocks Birkerts as a critic "scrambling for assignments, taking whatever comes his way," with no evidence, while admitting that he took on some of these books because they came his way from an editor. He repeatedly charges writers with grammatical and usage errors when he himself doesn't understand the proper use of "that" and "which," how to employ a semicolon, or how to parse redundancy: He thinks "murder of innocents" is as bad as "wet water." (Try law school, Dale.) Peck's idea of a grammatical sentence: "Tribune was a tiny town eighteen miles from the Colorado border, so named in honor of the great New York newspaperman." Copy desk to Peck: "Tribune" was not a newspaperman. Peck complains that Birkerts reuses images, but he himself overdoses on the same conceits: Barnes's characters are "Stepford Wives," "Stepford novels" are on the increase, and so on throughout the book. He mocks Crace for direct addresses to readers but does it all the time on his own. He faults the style of many writers, but his own ugly, half-page sentences cry out for an editor. Festooned with semicolons and awkward clauses, with excessive forays into "I" this and "I" that, they signal that his sentences spill out in the misshapen form in which he first conceived them. When he poses as a literary scholar, his lack of knowledge appalls. "Depending on your point of view," he writes, "the phenomenon of black women's writing could be said to have begun all the way back in the Harlem Renaissance." Copy desk to Peck, II: Read up on 18th- and 19th-century black women writers from Phillis Wheatley to Frances E.W. Harper. He thinks "objectivity and subjectivity began to separate into two distinct genres" in the first century CE, which might surprise Plato and the Greek playwrights. A critic who casually refers to Hemingway's "inscrutability" is clearly writing faster than he thinks, perhaps pressured by "scrambling for assignments." Again, like that headstrong undergraduate mediocrity who needs a makeover, Peck keeps quoting fuddy-duddy E.M. Forster's critical bromides -- "round" and "flat" characters and the like -- as if they're fresh, just as he unironically writes, "But even Freud was willing to admit that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," or, "It depends on whether you see the cup as half full or half empty," and thinks he's said something witty. Peck's ultimate failure is that he doesn't understand the logical upshot of his own critical premises. It is precisely because "real fiction invents and dispenses truth as it sees fit" -- his words -- that no fiction can be as wretched as he thinks most contemporary fiction is. Too many of Peck's judgments are worse than nasty -- they're hysterical and unsupported. To avail himself of forgiveness, he'll need to win several Pulitzers and National Book Awards for fiction, if not the Nobel Prize. Dale Peck is not the worst critic of his generation. He's simply the worst to have his essays gathered in book form. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches literature at Herzen University and philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, both in Russia. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 39, Page B16 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education