Hatchet Jobs

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Otto" <ottosell at yahoo.de>
To: "Pynchon Liste" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 11:02 AM
Subject: Hatchet Jobs


> Harsh reviewer should warm heart of devoted American novel reader
> BOOK NOTES
>
> By Fredric Koeppel, August 8, 2004
>
> (...)
> 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."
>

I'm sorry, but according to my logic Peck here says that he's read all and
everything of every writer of that generation to come to that conclusion.

> 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.
>

To me it seems as if Peck is deeply in love with DFW and wants to do that
sodomizing job himself.

> 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.
>

Of course I haven't read "Hatchet Jobs" yet but Koeppel at least should
provide one example for this. In my opinion a sentence like "Rick Moody is
the worst writer of his generation" simply doesn't sound as if a "analytical
reader" has written it.

>
> 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.
>

Here we come to the heart of the matter. What is the function of a novel? I
bet Koeppel has never read John Barth's "How to Make a Universe" ("The
Friday Book," pp. 13-25) or "Tales Within Tales Within Tales" (ibid, pp.
218-238) where Barth says: "(...) the proper subject of literature: 'human
life, its happiness and its misery'." (218)

I simply disagree that Pynchon (for example) has destroyed anything of what
Koeppel claims. "Vineland" (for example) very much deals with human
characters and its stories reveals the humanity or cruelty of those
characters from Zoyd to Brock.

> 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.
>

Yes, I assert that this idea of literature is pre-modern, 19th Century style
and unable to deal with human problems of the 21st Century. When I read
something like: "A hapless smear upon all that was brave and hopeful about
the American novel" I think I hear some Republican from Texas complaining
about "Gravity's Rainbow" and other modern contemporary literature, someone
who never took the time to read William Carlos Williams.

>
> 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
> (I did register, so don't waste your time)
>

Nobody should write negative book reviews; why waste time with a book I
don't like or an writer I dismiss while there's so much literature out there
I might love and my time's limited!

As Peck is obviously a gay writer/critic I'd love to hear something from him
about William S. Burroughs or some detailed criticism of Pynchon's way of
treating homosexuality in GR.

Otto