Hatchet Jobs

[Otto]

Harsh reviewer should warm heart of devoted American novel reader
BOOK NOTES

By Fredric Koeppel, August 8, 2004

Quick quiz:

Is it acceptable for a book reviewer to refer to an author as:

A. A bloviating baboon.

B. A moron who couldn't write his way out of a paper bag.

C. A hapless smear upon all that was brave and hopeful about the American
novel.

D. A girlie-man.

"All of the above" is the correct answer, and we have Dale Peck to thank for
this freedom since he raised (or lowered) the threshold so far on what one
is allowed to assert in a book review that all doors are open and no holds
are barred.

Peck is notorious for beginning a review of Rick Moody's book "The Black
Veil: A Memoir with Digressions" with the sentence "Rick Moody is the worst
writer of his generation."

That line, written in 2002, sent frissons of anger and anxiety through the
American literary world and precipitated a minor crisis about the ethics of
reviewing. Perhaps it's only because Moody is well-connected in social-lit
circles that Peck's assessment of meta-fictionist David Foster Wallace -
that he would be a better writer if someone "passionately" sodomized him -
didn't raise equal furor.

Twelve of Peck's slash-and-burn reviews have been collected in "Hatchet
Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature" (The New Press, $23.95). They
originally appeared in The New Republic, The Village Voice and the London
Review of Books.

While it's obvious that Peck's verbal and intellectual grandstanding and his
death-dealing invective occasionally obscure his larger purpose, it's also
clear that he is an acutely sympathetic and analytical reader and that he
cares fanatically about the art of writing.

Peck is also outrageously hilarious, a quality notably absent from most
journals devoted to literary matters and from the censorious or coolly
dismissive reviews "Hatchet Jobs" has received in the past few weeks. Even
the normally suave and witty John Leonard in the NYTBR tut-tutted about
Peck's laziness, churlishness and demagoguery, becoming so upset that he
slipped an agreement error into his essay and used "hair-shirt" as a verb.

Peck can, it has to be said, be glib and cheap. On the other hand, when, for
example, his machete of logic clears out the underbrush from Philip Roth's
novel "American Pastoral" and exposes the deep-seated mysogyny "that has
haunted so many of his books," we have to be grateful.

Peck is the Holden Caulfield of book reviewers. He can't stand phoniness, as
in Stanley Crouch's book "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome," which Peck
describes as "a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed, and put
forward in bad faith."

He also thinks that essayist and reviewer Sven Birkerts is a phony, though I
admit that, having read his 35-page diatribe against Birkerts twice I still
don't understand exactly what roused Peck's relentless venom. If it's the
case, however, that Birkerts indeed "most represents the offensive
banalities of the worst mainstream reviewing combined with the defensive
pieties of the 'best' haute criticism" and that he is "the most prolific and
the most sanctimonious, the lowest common denominator of the American
critical establishment," then perhaps we should read Birkerts more
carefully, at least to test Peck's proposition.

Like Holden Caulfield, whose bruised and broken innocence leads him to a
breakdown, Peck is perpetually heartbroken because another author has
destroyed his innocent devotion to the novel; his reaction, however, is not
confusion but anger and righteousness. These dynamic (and sometimes numb
ing) qualities are directed chiefly at such postmodernists as Thomas
Pynchon, Don DeLillo (whose novels are "just plain stupid"), John Barth,
William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme and their legions of cadet fabulators and
new narrativists.

What those writers (and the critics who adore them) have destroyed with
narrative highjinks and digging into the "truth" about history - as if that
were the novel's function - is what is most essential about the novel: its
ability to make us believe in human characters and to engage with stories
that reveal their humanity.

Yes, that sentiment has a 19th Century ring about it - I just finished
"Buddenbrooks" and am in thrall - yet Peck is correct about so much of what
he says (shouts) in "Hatchet Jobs." A great deal of the fiction produced
since the mid-20th Century may be clever (and monstrously sincere) but it
feels soulless, merely smart, horrendously ambitious and virtuosic and,
whatever its appeals to history and cultural completeness, closed-in.

Two essays in "Hatchet Jobs" did not require Peck's flame-thrower. He uses a
review of Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Timequake" to praise the career of American
fiction's "crazy uncle." And he writes in unstinting gratitude for Rebecca
Brown's spare memoir, "Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary."

One hopes it is not the case that Peck is "no longer (going to) write
negative book reviews," as he says in the book's introduction. Sure, the guy
needs to grow up, but we can't afford to lose his chastening vision and his
tendency to let bad writing break his heart. We should all be so sensitive.

- Fredric Koeppel: 529-2376
http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/books/article/0,1426,MCA_484_3089865,00.html
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