May 31, 2002 | [Read the story.]
What a weight off my shoulders.
Herman Melville
R. W. Emerson
(some of) Don DeLillo
Dreiser
They are crap, they really are.
-- Stephen Rifkin
Tom Bissell "[has] never read more than a dozen sequential pages" of Faulkner or James, yet proclaims the former "perhaps the streakiest writer to have ever lived" and that even the latter's "shorter work left [him] feeling as though a very large screw indeed were turning into [his] brain." These must have been very short streaks indeed, and I wonder how Mr. Bissell can distinguish between James' short stories and novels when he reads only a bare fraction of either. Reading more than mere snippets of these writers' works would allow him to learn if his critiques are valid. But to be fair, he may go on to make many cogent -- even brilliant -- points in his essay; it's not for me to say, as I have never read more than a dozen sentences of Tom Bissell.
-- Mike Murphy
I was rather relieved to see Tom Bissell's article about the authors he hates to hate. I once admitted to my American lit I professor that I utterly despised Henry James. She calmly told me that she had done her dissertation on James. Gulp. I shall always be grateful to her that she seemed to understand, if not share, my intolerance for reading James.
Like Bissell, I have to lump Faulkner inexplicably into the same miserable basket as James. Some day, I hope not to be ashamed about it.
-- Rebecca McCamish
It takes Tom Bissell five electronic pages to discover that readers are likely to actually read the books they enjoy instead of the books others say are supposed to be good for them.
Why in the name of sweet flippin' Faulkner would readers read books they didn't like outside the sometimes dusty confines of a college lit class?
I'm a college English instructor and I would never read any book I found boring or poorly written just because the book was called "great" by anyone else.
Life is too short to spend reading books I don't enjoy. Besides, I have to read too many student essays I don't enjoy anyway. But at least I get paid for that.
-- Roy Hill
This guy is an editor for a major New York book publisher! Excuse me while I giggle. (No wonder so much crap is published under the guise of "literary" fiction.) I'll restrain myself, for the most part, and take issue with only a few obvious comments: Beckett was a playwright fundamentally, and condemning him on the basis of a few written pages, without having seen his work onstage, is like rejecting Cezanne's work after reading his written description of a painting; Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote their best work in their 20s ("Sun Also Rises" and "Gatsby"), and so did Joyce -- "The Dead" and "Dubliners"; what's worse, no mention of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano," nor of Martin Amis, Burroughs, Carver, Cheever, Ford, Denis Johnson, Gordimer, Kerouac, Kosinski, Kundera, Greene, McEwan, García Márquez, Murakami, Munro, Murdoch, Musil, Naipaul, Pynchon, Roth, among many other great writers.
Finally, to prefer Joan Didion's politics (formerly Republican, now Reform Party) to her wonderful fiction is to admit, in the court of no appeal, his unrepentant guilt as a blubbering twit.
-- George Gilbert
I read Tom's essay with relief of recognizing a fellow sufferer. I, too, can't get through much Faulkner, despite my Southern roots, and a force-feeding professor, and actually faked my way through "Portrait of a Lady" for a college class.
Also, the passage about the "surrogate neediness" of avid readers stuck me as particularly apt. A few weeks ago, after a particularly interesting lesson in criticism via mob psychology, my book club turned to a discussion of cigarettes and addiction. One woman talked about how much she thought about cigarettes and how they were the first thing on her mind when she woke, and how her desire for one always lurked in her mind and often distracted her at work.
"Hmm," I thought. "I'm that way about books."
-- Susan Potter
Tom Bissell should not worry about disliking so many "great" writers. As he points out, reading is an emotional commitment and some folks just don't get along all that well.
I find that most literature annoys me. In my work I sometimes see enough human drama in a day to fill several novels. For relaxation I read sociology or I'll once again spend an evening chuckling over Florence King's ruminations on the WASP condition. The important thing is to read. It is less important what one reads. It is the stimulation of the mind with the words. It is the thoughts that the words generate in oneself, thoughts that will never come while watching a movie or a play. (I must confess, though, that I finally understood Shakespeare after seeing Olivier's "Hamlet." So that's what it means, I thought!)
To Mr. Bissell's unreadable writers I would add James Joyce and most contemporary Americans. Joyce Carol Oates is annoying and Joan Didion is unobservant. (With Didion, it's probably all those years in L.A., where there is nothing to observe.) Of course, as the son of schoolteachers and a native of Pennsylvania, I reflexively defend John Updike.
I recall struggling through "Moby-Dick" in high school, to the point of physical illness. Some time later (I think during college) I found Richard Armour's wonderful parodies of the classics. In summarizing "Moby-Dick," Armour told the reader that the book was 133 chapters long, only 36 of which had anything to do with the story or the plot. I thought Armour was being generous with the 36. As long as one reads, it matters not what one reads. As long as Mr. Bissell continues to read what moves him, he will continue to write as well as he obviously does now.
-- Steven T. Flowers
Next page: "Just because some Southern genius has all day to drink whiskey ..."
