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[Ghetta Life]

The review link below does get to the heart of the problem with Peck's 
desire to  "the excision from the canon, or at least the demotion in status, 
of most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, 
Pynchon, DeLillo."

Here:

on Joyce he blames the current debased state of the novel, stranded (as he 
believes it to be) between a naive realism, on the one hand, and a 
postmodern formal gimmickry "that has systematically divested itself of any 
ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on 
anything." As far as Peck's concerned, "both of them, in my opinion, 
suck.... I think the modes need to be thrown out entirely." But what he 
wants to replace them with isn't clear: although he does occasionally betray 
certain tastes ("the traditional satisfactions of fictional 
narrative—believable characters, satisfactory storylines, epiphanies and the 
like," and mumbles something about a "new materialism," he refuses to say 
what a new "mode" would look like:

'My goal was never to offer an alternative model to the kinds of writing I 
discuss here, because it's precisely when a line is drawn in the sand that 
people begin to toe it and you fall into the trap of reification, of 
contemporaneity, an inability to react to changing circumstances.
Given the authority and vehemence of everything that has preceded them, this 
is evasive.'

In a way, "inability to react to changing circumstances" may be said to 
characterize Peck's own position, as much as it's possible to figure out 
what it might be. Like his colleague at The New Republic, the estimable and 
excellent James Wood, Peck seems to want more novels like the great 
nineteenth-century novels: serious, impassioned, fat, authoritative. But you 
can't write nineteenth-century social novels about twenty-first-century 
global culture, because the form and preoccupations of the 
nineteenth-century novel are different from those that might properly 
interpret the twenty-first century: whatever you think of the 
self-referential gamesmanship of authors like David Foster Wallace and Dave 
Eggers, their desire to write books that reflect their own inability to 
comment on anything but their own inability to comment on anything is a 
reflection of the anxieties —and realities—of the world in which we actually 
live. You can call all you want for a return to what is, essentially, a 
Victorian "materialism," but it's like calling for the return of 
sixteenth-century Venetian opera or Greek tragedy.

Ghetta

>From: cfalbert <calbert at hslboxmaster.com>
>
>For more detail see the NYRB piece on Peck...
>
>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17241

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