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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
Snarking
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
THERE isn't a better place to write about the practice of book reviewing than the Literary Review. And there couldn't be a more interesting book and book reviewer to review than Hatchet Jobs and Dale Peck. This little book of six literary essays, savaging contemporary American fiction, has sparked a hot debate on the value and function of book reviews. Peck, a critic just in his thirties, writing for The New Republic, will leave you aghast and mesmerised at his devastating pronouncements: "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." Thus begins his essay on one of America's most acclaimed contemporary authors. To see how shocking this could be, you must imagine an Indian book reviewer opening her review on a much-revered contemporary Indian writer with such a diatribe. Several critics from the best literary journals rushed to Moody's defense. Another young literary critic, Heidi Julavits, wrote an essay-length response (titled: "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing") to this piece, calling Peck a "snark" — a reviewer who takes on a "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt" when reviewing.
Not opinionated
But Peck's essay doesn't feel like another mean, opinionated review. I found it intelligent and, more importantly, closely and precisely argued. There is little or no generalisation here. Even that opening invective — "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation" — he explains in an interview to fellow book critic, James Atlas, that "What I mean is that Moody has sold his talent out more than any other writer." He presents his case with specific details from the novel — details of prose, dialogue and style. It is obvious that he has read the book several times and very, very closely. How many book reviewers — particularly Indian reviewers — would do that? How many of us really read a book to be reviewed this closely before we praise or damn it? We need an Indian Dale Peck to closely and accurately assess some of our more mediocre and overrated writers. Peck's great gift is to show — not tell — us where a writer has gone wrong. "The massive literary advances and domination of display and review space have crowded out competitors," he objects to James Atlas. "The lavish praise critics bestow on contemporary fiction renders them complicit in its mediocrity."
Peck's books reviews raise the question of "What should reviews be? Civil and dialogic or provocative and opinionated?" Peck's reviews go beyond looking at "is this a good book or not" to asking what literature can and cannot do. Thus Hatchet Jobs moves from mere book reviewing to literary criticism, from small ideas to large ideas. My admiration for Peck grew when I discovered he wasn't picking only on his contemporaries — he is out to gun down the masters as well. Reading these reviews, you suddenly encounter a quick, deft thrust at the writers the world considers modern masters of the novel. "Dickens", he says, "is the worst writer to plague the English language." Here is a passage that is sure to leave you shaken: "The modernist tradition", he writes, "began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses, continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov, and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo." Later even Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Franzen and Salman Rushdie are not spared.
Murderously sharp
Dale Peck's "murderously sharp" writing was first noticed by that extraordinary English literary critic, James Wood, who got him to write for The New Republic. In an interview to Atlas, the journal's editor said: "By my lights we're living in a culture of worthless admirations in which people are praising writers unjustly and to no purpose. I was delighted to find a reviewer who cared so much about prose fiction and who took so much offence at what he considered to be the violation of its first principle that he was prepared to be murderously sharp." If you are interested in another brilliant book reviewer who also dismantles literary reputations with his close reading, turn to Craig Raine, especially his essay collection, In Defense of T.S. Eliot, where he finishes off, among others, Paul Auster and Joseph Brodsky. His close reading of Brodsky's poems demolishes them so completely that you can't read Brodsky ever again! In his profile of Dale Peck, James Atlas writes of the time when at a National Book Awards ceremony, the actor Steve Martin threatened to let Peck lose on the audience: "if anyone applauds before everyone has been announced, they will be reviewed by Dale Peck."
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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