Hatchet Jobs

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
July 18, 2004
'Hatchet Jobs': Smash-Mouth Criticism
By JOHN LEONARD

HATCHET JOBS 
Writings on Contemporary Fiction.
By Dale Peck.
228 pp. The New Press. $23.95.  

ALTHOUGH Robert Southey was the poet laureate of
England from 1813 until his death in 1843, and a Lake
District buddy of Coleridge and Wordsworth, he is
hardly read at all today. A wisecrack by Richard
Porson may have done some serious damage. About
Southey's epic poems, Porson said, ''They will be read
when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but -- not till
then.'' 

You will notice that I mosey. Some of us, when we are
about to be unpleasant, are bothered by the feeling
that it's almost as hard to write a bad book as a good
one and lots easier to write a slash-and-burn review.
So we walk around the block to suck up Randall Jarrell
and perspective. Others, like Dale Peck, fall down out
of the sky on the head of the pedestrian author like a
piano or a safe. Peck is his own blunt instrument. 

Which is why, in ''Hatchet Jobs,'' his Newgate
Calendar of maledictions, he leans on words with
primary colors, like terrible, bloated, boring and
gratuitous; hate, resent, stale and slather; maudlin,
dreck, drivel and insipid; muddled, pretentious,
derivative and bathetic -- not to mention scatologies
that can't be reprinted here but brought no blush to
the bum of The New Republic, where most of Peck's
fatwas first appeared and where most of American
literature is generally considered a waste of the
editors' warped space and deep time. 

Peck is so hard on his elders that you suspect him of
symbolic patricide, except that he is just as hard on
his peers. Famously, of course, Rick Moody: ''the
worst writer of his generation.'' But Colson Whitehead
gets it for his ''stiff, schematic'' first novel,
''The Intuitionist,'' and a second, ''John Henry
Days,'' with ''the doughy center of a half-baked
cake.'' David Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest'' so
much fails to amuse him that he wishes on Wallace an
anal assault. Richard Powers, Dave Eggers and the
Jonathans, Franzen and Lethem, are rudely dismissed
for lack of ''a true empathetic undercurrent'' and
what he elsewhere disdains as ''pomo shenanigans.''
Nor is he impressed by the Dirty Realists (trailer
homes), the Brat Packers (nightclubs) or the New
Narrativists (sexual transgression). 

But the wise old heads are also on his chopping block.
So Nabokov, between ''Lolita'' and ''Pale Fire,'' sold
out to ''sterile inventions.'' At the bottom of its
bowl of ''watery oatmeal,'' the subtext of ''American
Pastoral'' is Philip Roth's misogyny. Thomas Pynchon
in ''a 30-year writing career hasn't produced a single
memorable or even recognizably human character.''
Julian Barnes ''crawls under your skin and itches like
scabies.'' Stanley Crouch's ''Don't the Moon Look
Lonesome'' is such ''a terrible novel, badly
conceived, badly executed and put forward in bad
faith,'' that it's amazing the guy shows up on Charlie
Rose. The ''ridiculous dithering'' of John Barth, John
Hawkes and William Gaddis isn't even worth discussing,
but they belong to ''a bankrupt tradition'' going back
to James Joyce and ''the diarrheic flow of words that
is 'Ulysses,' '' which tradition has now broken down
''like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the
stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of Don DeLillo.''

[...]

Is he really that afraid of Heidi Julavits? The hit
man is projecting. So Western literary culture went
off the tracks with J. Joyce, smashed up entirely with
D. DeLillo and deserves wholesale junk-heaping, from
the modernists who merely twinkle-toed in the theater
of war, one blood war after another, to the
post-toasties who can't even tell anymore if they're
being ironic. In place of the word games, Peck would
bring back ''something ineffable, alchemical,
mystical: the potent cocktail of writer and reader and
language, of intention and interpretation, conscious
and unconscious, text, subtext and context, narrative,
character, metaphor'' -- novels ''illustrating the
tension between society and the self,'' written by the
old-fashioned sort of Author-God who ''feels guilty
about causing his characters to suffer so much and
offers them apologies in the form of epiphanies or the
satisfaction of inhabiting a meaningful narrative.'' 

Scratch a commissar and you get a philistine. But I
haven't mentioned Sven Birkerts, have I? Never mind
DeLillo, who is smarter than all of us (except maybe
Powers). Or Pynchon, whose Mason and Dixon are
certainly more memorable than Peck's Martin and
John....

[...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/books/review/18LEONAR

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com