I mentioned previously that I have been reading a book by Dale Peck entitled Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature, which consists of previously published book reviews in which Peck give literature and its authors a thorough drubbing.  Peck, who is a novelist himself, is most famous for his scathing review of Rick Moody's pseudo-memoir The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, in which he begins with the sentence, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."  Peck proceeds in this review to wander off the topic at hand, the book being reviewed, and launches into a tirade against literature in which the writers seem to be screaming, "Pay attention to me because I'm important," or as Peck refers to it as a "child needing attention."  Among the authors included in this dubious group a many that I consider great, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, and others I really enjoy and think are interesting, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers.  I usually enjoy these types of "one man's opinion" or "my state of the union" addresses towards literature refreshing, as in B.R. Myers' A Reader's Manifesto, but it's hard to read that the entire body of work by one of your favorite writers, in this case DeLillo, consists of nothing more than "stupid-just plain stupid-tomes" or, in Pynchon's case a "word-by-word wasting of a talent [so] formidable."  Of course, this can be chalked up as being one man's opinion and nothing more than that. 

However, Peck ends the book with an afterword that serves as a summation of the book's main themes and the reason the reviews seem so harsh.  This serves as little more than a cop-out on Peck's part because firstly he offers a lame defense for his severity and secondly offers little or no recommendations on how to improve the state of literature. 

Addressing the issue of why he's so harsh in his reviews, Peck offers the following:

It is true that as a critic I don't say much about the strengths of the writers whom I review. Most of those writers had thousands of words devoted to their individual strengths long before I got around to cataloguing their weaknesses: they don't need me to point them out again. And God knows I have never aspired to anything like impartiality. If anything, I have always considered my flagrant bias to be one of the saving graces of my efforts. If I am extreme in my opinions, this stridency can always be attributed to its author rather than to some kind of universal authority. The very extremity of my views does as much to undermine my authority as to enforce it, or at least I hope it does, because I am by no means convinced of the hallowedness of my own ideas. And talent, again, is not the issue here: content is, and context. It seems to me that there are two strains of literature currently in vogue, recherche postmodernism and recidivist realism, and both of them, in my opinion, stink. I'm not interested in pointing out how a writer works well in one mode or another, or executes an aspect of one or another mode with a greater or lesser degree of success, because I think the modes themselves need to be thrown out entirely. Not as tools for writers sitting down to a blank page, but rather as the two poles they must choose between, and against which they are judged.

 

To me, this is nothing more than a contradiction in terms.  Peck seems to feel that, on the one hand, he's not important enough to be taken seriously, but, on the other hand, he's still making legitimate arguments for the improvement of literature, however vague they may be.  It's the very type of writing he criticizes that he employs here to defend his actions.  Trying to have it both ways is impossible, but Peck tries to explain how he can do so. 

 

On the issue of the future writing, Peck offers this:

If I don't say much about the strengths of the writers whom I review, nor do I offer an alternative to the writing I spend so much time dissing. Sympathetic readers have often asked, if this is what writers shouldn't be doing, then what should they do? My feeling is that the last thing readers need is a writer telling them what to read (besides his or her own books, of course). And as for writers: well, if you need me to tell you how to write a novel, then you probably shouldn't be writing one in the first place. Still, there are some things I would like to say to my peers. But it's hard to tell someone whom you admire (or respect, or want to help, or in some way engage with) that you think there are problems with his or her work, let alone that it is, well, worthless. These reviews, if not as direct as a coffee klatch (or barroom brawl), are, I hope, some kind of dialogue with my generation. If, in the end, I offer nothing more than a series of prohibitions, it is because I think that it is precisely the need to sign on to a program that kills literature. As soon as a writer starts writing to belong to a tradition or a program or a school rather than to describe what's going on in the world, he or she has gone from being part of the solution to being part of the problem. Something that can be held up to a pre-determined list of attributes to be checked off one by one, so that a score of 80 percent makes it good, 90 percent makes it great, and 100 percent gets it a gold star, isn't art, it's high school. The year I graduated, the valedictorian was well known to be the best cheater in school: I helped him in English, my best friend let him look over his shoulder in math, and the science whiz (daughter of the science teacher, no less) helped him with biology and chemistry. As it happens, he was not a particularly stupid guy, and he was also reasonably nice, which was probably why we all helped him. But we were all shocked--not to mention a little angry--when he got to give the commencement speech instead of one of us. I have no interest in contributing to the making of another Cy Diller.

 

In other words, Peck sees himself as trying to avoid the position of being the one to tell writers how to write, but he sees no problem with pointing out their flaws in the execution of their projects.  In one of his few conceits, it's interesting to note that Peck doesn't argue that all the writers he criticizes are talentless.  Instead, they are just not using their talent in the right way.  What he would rather see them writing he never specifies, but I can't help but think it probably looks a lot like his own novels. 

 

What bothers me the most about Peck's assertions on the state of literature is that his vagueness and genuine inability to provide concrete suggestions on how to repair it leaves the impression that he's nothing more than a jealous novelist that can't stand to see those that he despises so much reap the rewards of success that he so desperately wants for himself.  For all the harshness of his critiques, it's almost requisite that you would expect a set of suggestions, but they aren't there.  Calling an entire industry on the carpet for its failures is a worthy cause, but to fail to provide a blueprint for the future serves little or no purpose than to provide the hallow critiques of a bitter man.