Pecked
Dale Peck's scathing review of Rick Moody and a dozen other writers of "postmodern drivel" has the literary world buzzing about what makes for good -- and bad -- criticism.
By Heather Caldwell
July 24, 2002 | The first sentence of the review resembled an author's darkest nightmare: "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." The critic was a fellow novelist, Dale Peck, writing in the July 1 issue of the New Republic, and the review, of Moody's new memoir, "The Black Veil," went on to eviscerate not only all of Moody's work, but seemingly every critically acclaimed contemporary novelist. Moody, Peck complains after a dissection of the author's "very bad" book, belongs to a group of writers who constitute "the highest of canonical postmodernism ... a bankrupt tradition ... that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses'; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of DeLillo."
Soon after the review was posted to the New Republic's Web site, literary writers and critics were calling and e-mailing each other about it, and the hive is still buzzing. Like it or not, Peck's down-flung gauntlet has the literati talking about such larger questions as: What makes for good criticism? Is the literary world too polite and clubby? Can a novelist fairly review his more critically acclaimed rival? And finally, what is the effect of this kind of skirmish on literary culture at large?
This isn't the first time Peck's criticism has raised eyebrows; he's become a literary hit man, most recently known for his savage assassinations of Stanley Crouch and Jim Crace, also in the New Republic. But this time, even New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier says he wasn't prepared for the "magnitude of the massacre." In some 6,000 words, Peck presents himself as, by turns, a crusader rescuing literature from the contaminating horrors of Moody's "pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic" prose; a vigilante, rounding up a gang of similarly despicable culprits (the list of trounced scribblers is so long and illustrious that those not on it must feel left out); and a moralizing parent, admonishing readers, "If you honestly do not believe that this is bad writing, then you are a part of the problem."
Reactions from other book reviewers ranged from dumbfounded horror to cringing respect to something like exhilaration. "So much reviewing these days is tantamount to playing patty-cake," says David Kipen, book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. "I found Peck completely invigorating."
But writer Andrew Solomon ("The Noonday Demon"), who himself trounced Moody's memoir in another publication, notes, "For a disparagement to be persuasive the reviewer must recognize the merits of the writer under discussion before proceeding to his faults. By refusing to recognize any of Rick Moody's strengths, Dale Peck destroys his credibility and looks really very foolish."
Critic Sven Birkerts agreed and argued, furthermore, that "reviews like this subtly degrade the profession, and experience shows that the long-range consequence is seldom to the advantage of the hit man."
Other observers note that such a display of literary venom wouldn't cause much of a fuss if it were published in England or Europe. Like bewigged M.P.s lobbing rhetorical spitballs at the prime minister, British critics thrive on a healthy irreverence. A review that might be perceived as endearingly caustic in Britain would be shockingly out of place in the U.S. "British reviewers are much more unapologetic than American ones when they attack material they think is weak," says Solomon. "They have in general, however, a strong sense of irony and a keen sense of their own position as they write a review; their cruelty tends to be playful. They would not tend to do what Peck does, which is to exaggerate the importance of the topic and of himself."
Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review, briskly assesses the differences between domestic and continental roastings: "There's a certain kind of review that makes news. The Brits have a formula for this. You call up the author's ex-husband or ex-wife and ask them to write something; it makes for lively copy. On the other hand, there's a question of fairness and responsibility. We're talking about writers' livelihoods, after all."
London Review of Books critic Jenny Turner points out that in her experience, American editors at least attempt to avoid obvious conflicts of interest by ensuring that the critic doesn't know a novelist personally before assigning a review. In the U.K., she says, no one bothers to ask whether extraliterary concerns might pose an ethical dilemma for the writer.
Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, another writer mentioned in Peck's review of the Moody book, remarks that in Germany, where he lives, "The gloves are off when it comes to literary criticism. There isn't so much professional courtesy as in the States."
Dennis Schenk, a German critic who, like Peck, has been the subject of controversy for his lambasting of canonized German writers like Peter Handke and G|nter Grass, agrees that the German intellectual climate is more diverse. Most American reviews, he says, "exude the unappealing stench of a high school library where students are sweating over reading reports." They suffer from "first, a purely journalistic agenda by book reviewers just in the same way a journalist would cover a fire in the neighborhood or a speech by a politician. Instead of entering into an aesthetic discussion, dreary plot summaries take up the precious space. Finally, the notion that 'we are all in this together,' that the reading public is a beleaguered small group and that 'we' should not waste our energy with squabbles among ourselves, is a sure recipe for cultural entropy."