NP journo trashes contemporary authors

[Doug Millison]

>PW Daily for Booksellers from Publishers Weekly
>http://www.publishersweekly.com
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>Contents for the issue sent Thursday, July 12, 2001:
>
[...]
>Atlantic Debunking Evocative of Not Much
>
>What if they trashed the literary establishment and nobody cared? The
>Atlantic magazine's other contrarian article this month--the one more
>interesting than the chestnut about whether superstores are good for
>America (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/allen.htm) accuses a
>number of showhorse writers of mediocrity and blasts the editors and
>critics who encourage them.
>
>The essay's emperors-new-clothes argument (reminiscent in some ways of Tom
>Wolfe's screed of a few years back) is too vast to be summarized. But if
>you haven't read it, it comes down to this: 1) Prize juries reward a good
>sentence over a dazzling passage, story or character,  2) Those sentences
>are often overblown, overwritten and overrated, 3) Don DeLillo sucks.
>
>The author of the piece--one unknown B.R. Myers--also exegisizes
>contemporary stars like Cormac McCarthy, Rick Moody, Annie Proulx, David
>Guterson and Paul Auster, putting them down for convoluted writing that he
>says lacks the clarity of Bellow or the story-telling chops of Stephen
>King.
>
>Whatever the argument's merits, bookstores might say that it doesn't
>matter. Prize stickers, they claim, help sell books; Myers thinks that
>juries dish them out reflexively, to the wrong authors. Booksellers say
>blurbs catch a shopper's eye; Myers counters that critics have gotten lazy
>with their adjectives. "It is easier to call writing like Proulx's
>lyrically evocative or poetically compelling than to figure out what it
>evokes," he writes.
>
>His is, um, an entertaining and thoughtful essay, with points astute,
>specious and provocative all rolled into one grape leaf of an argument. But
>perhaps most provocative is how little its, well, provoked. "It will start
>a firestorm among the literati. I can't wait," wrote one book editor
>outside New York last week. Industry reaction, however, has been closer to
>a mild drizzle. Some people haven't read it, or they've read it and not
>noticed, or, as Myers might argue, they've read it but are too busy
>sleepwaking through pretentious prose to care. Last weekend Myers appeared
>on NPR, but that didn't do much to goose interest. It's a shame, because
>like it or not, the piece is a rarity: long (16 pages crammed with text),
>passionate, at once, um, serious and highly readable.
>
>Unfortunately, readable does not always with equate with read. "I've heard
>zero," says Little, Brown editor Geoff Shandler, as good a touchstone among
>young editors as any, adding he didn't really get why Myers was so in a
>lather. "A lot of the books in stores today have a very strong sense of
>storytelling. It seems a little like a rich person complaining about the
>capital-gains tax."
>
>Even the piece's editor, Ben Schwarz, himself a member of the NBCC board,
>was a little taken aback. "I've been surprised. I was expecting a much more
>hostile response." Schwarz says he's heard from many readers but none of
>the authors--or their editors. Ditto for us; at press time, calls to
>editors of Guterson and Moody had gone unreturned.
>
>The exception to the silence is critics themselves. Theirs is a split
>opinion. New York Times Book Review editor Chip McGrath is writing a letter
>to the Atlantic agreeing with most, but not all, of the critique. Jonathan
>Yardley mostly supported Myers in his Washington Post column. But two other
>super-critics--Nation literary editor Art Winslow and L.A. Times Book
>Review chief Steve Wasserman--were reportedly less tickled.
>
>Sitting at the eye of this swirl of heavy hitters is Myers (first name:
>Brian). With a generic-sounding name and an Atlantic bio that lists him
>only as "liv[ing] and writ[ing] in New Mexico," it's tempting to think of
>him as a deliciously pseudonymous figure, the Joe Klein of literary
>criticism. Alas, the media has not pulled out its Sherlock Holmes costume,
>Jim Romenesko has not been bombarded with e-mails and the truth,
>regrettably, is more prosaic. Myers has a PhD in Korean literature (book
>credit: Han Sorya and North Korean Literature from Cornell UP) and is not,
>according to Schwarz, actively seeking publicity.
>
>"He wants the argument to speak for itself," Schwarz says. "He's a serious
>reader, and he's writing for people like himself--serious readers who are
>not necessarily part of the cognoscenti. This piece confirms what they've
>always felt: reviewers tell them to like a book and then they can't read
>it. That's why so many of our readers have read the piece and loved it."
>The same can't be said for the industry, but Myers shouldn't be
>discouraged: most people, after all, don't read Proulx either.--Steven
>Zeitchik