Dale Peck reviews Pynchon

[Robert Mahnke]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 1:56 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> This guy is an ass:



Recall his review of Rick Moody's The Black Veil, of which this is the start:

Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.

I apologize for the abruptness of this declaration, its lack of
nuance, of any meaning besides the intuitive; but as I made my way
through Moody's oeuvre during the past few months I was unable to come
up with any other starting point for a consideration of his
accomplishment. Or, more accurately, every other starting point that I
tried felt disingenuous, nothing more than a way of setting Moody up
in order to knock him down. One of those starting points was this:
"Rick Moody is a lot of things, but he is not actually dumb." This was
an attempt at charity, and though I still think that it's true enough,
I don't think that it matters; at any rate, his intelligence does not
make up for the badness of his books. Another attempt: "In his
breakthrough novel The Ice Storm, Rick Moody evinces a troubling
fascination with adolescent sexual organs that is partially explained
in his latest book, The Black Veil, a so-called 'memoir with
digressions.'" Again, the observation strikes me as correct. The
problem here was in assuming that what most readers think of as the
subject of a story has any role in a Moody project beyond giving his
tangled prose something to wrap itself around, the way a vine will
wrap itself around the nearest thing to hand, be it trellis, tree, or
trash.

Yet another false start: "The Black Veil is the worst of Rick Moody's
very bad books." Here the first mistake was in focusing on the books
themselves, which bear the same relationship to Moody's career as his
subjects do to his prose: the former come across as little more than a
prop for the latter, incidental, interchangeable. Moreover, Garden
State, Moody's first book — despite his citing "the proposition put
forth by a vocal minority: that Garden State is my best novel" — is,
in fact, even worse than The Black Veil; and "The Black Veil is the
second worst of Rick Moody's very bad books" just doesn't have the
same ring to it.

Stop reading here if you are looking for a calm dissection of the work
of Hiram Frederick Moody III. At this point, the use of the diminutive
"Rick" is about the only wise decision that I am willing to give him
credit for. The plain truth is that I have stared at pages and pages
of Moody's prose and they remain as meaningless to me as the Korean
characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant. Actually, the
comparison is not particularly apt, because I know that the Korean
writing means something, but I am not convinced that Moody's books are
about anything at all. In fact, it is only when I consider The Black
Veil stripped of any pretense to content that I can ascribe it a
measure of objecthood — not as the diagnostic, hermeneutical genealogy
that it purports to be, but rather as the latest in what I have come
to regard as a series of imitations or echoes of Moody's more
talented, or at any rate more authentically individual, peers.

Seen in this light, The Black Veil is Moody's attempt at A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Purple America Moody's
version of Infinite Jest, and The Ice Storm his take on The Virgin
Suicides, and Garden State a pastiche of various writers who published
in Between C and D, the journal of choice for the post-punk New
Narrative writers of the 1980s. No doubt Moody is even now at work on
a sprawling "social novel" in the manner of The Corrections; and given
his rate of output — six books in a decade — we can probably expect to
see it in stores by the end of next year, just in time for Christmas.

Together these books amount not so much to an oeuvre as to a career,
one whose success, though fascinating, is inexplicable to me. In fact,
I have to confess that I consider myself unequal to the task of
analyzing Moody's writing. Its faults strike me as uniform and
self-evident and none of them are complex enough for a sustained
analysis. My gut feeling is that if you honestly do not believe that
this is bad writing, then you are a part of the problem. When I
finished The Black Veil I scrawled "Lies! Lies! All lies!" on the
cover and considered my job done. Like all of Moody's books, it is
pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic. His much-touted compassion
strikes me as false (in his fiction he makes his characters suffer in
order to solicit your pity, and this seems no less true of the self
that he describes in The Black Veil); his highly praised prose —
"rhythmic" and "evocative" are the tags that you see most often —
comes only at the expense of precision, which is to say, of truth.

http://www.powells.com/review/2002_07_04.html

With that as a comparison, his review of Against The Day comes off as
perky and loving.