Criticism: 'Snarky' critic Dale Peck is no Dorothy Parker when it comes to incisive putdowns.
Dale Peck, who has garnered a certain reputation by passing down intemperate and caustic judgments on his fellow novelists, has gathered a few of his favourite slingshot reviews into a manifesto aimed at the clumsy, hulking corpus of contemporary fiction. In the space of a single sentence - "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation" - Peck stirred up such seething among US writers and reviewers that even victims less swiftly skewered have seen fit to slap him down. A recent public fracas with novelist Stanley Crouch will doubtless sharpen the sales profile of this surprisingly dull selection.
The trouble with Hatchet Jobs is not its avowed viciousness. A polemic in Dave Eggers's magazine The Believer, railing against Peck's "snarky" tone, got this badly wrong. The critic ought to be allowed all manner of lethal weaponry, up to and including ad hominem dismissals (that said, Dale Peck is no Dorothy Parker when it comes to incisive write-offs, still less a Susan Sontag, his favoured critical exemplar).
No: the problem is rather the quality of Peck's judgments, which time and again suggest a sensibility flailing about, not striking home. His central thesis has it that the modern novel (by which he means, mostly, the modern American novel) has got itself stuck in a postmodern mulch of pseudo- intellectualism, experimental over-reaching and sociological doomsaying. It all went wrong, apparently, with Ulysses (of which dubious pronouncement, more later). He parades the usual suspects - Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme - as well as their later avatars: Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, the hapless Moody.
Nobody could deny Peck the autonomy of his tastes (and, to be fair, he loathes a less defined contemporary "realism" just as fervently). If he affects to despise everything some of us love about the literature of the last century - formal daring is just the start - then all well and good: each to their own esoteric pleasure. But does he have to endlessly expose, like a hopeful flasher, the dismaying flaccidity of his actual analysis? Formal experimentation is a Bad Thing why, precisely? Because, it turns out, it threatens to terrify that mythical and fragile creature, the "common reader". In fact, Peck is more specific than that, socioculturally speaking: he writes in scandalised defence of "the members of the educated bourgeoisie, who are sick and tired of feeling like they've somehow failed the modern novel". And there you have the essence of Peck's mimsy vision. Never mind that the "educated bourgeoisie" seem to be doing just fine with DeLillo, Eggers, Franzen, and so on; Peck longs, like some tweedy ghost from the TLS of a century ago, for sturdy characters with whom he can identify, sentences that make sense. Never has so much critical bile been spilt in the name of an aesthetic so mild-mannered and uncontroversial.
Hatchet Jobs is not all bad. Peck deals diligently and amusingly with the misogyny of Philip Roth's American Pastoral, and essays a distinctly sensible description of various kinds of well-meaning bad faith at work in contemporary gay fiction. As a critic of the politics of the modern novel, he is almost invariably astute, which is one reason his ineffectual way with aesthetic detail and literary history is so irritating (especially as those are the topics on which he prides himself most). His self-declared fastidiousness encourages readerly pedantry. He thinks that Wallace Stevens's word "floribund" is a concoction of "florid" and "moribund"; as any gardener could tell him, it's not: but it sounds like it is, and that's why it works. He thinks the key influences on Ulysses (note: not just analogues) were William James and T.S. Eliot.
And then there is the matter of his own style: a medium in which "transition" is a verb, and banal metaphors are so belaboured that by the time he announces (of an obscurely significant hole in the ground) "I want to embrace that image, but also let it go", this reader could only sigh: yes Dale, please, give it up . . . And if that sounds "snarky", consider this: "genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby". That was Walter Benjamin, a critic who deserves better than to be seen in the same sentence. As Dale Peck.
Brian Dillon is a writer and critic. His book on memory and mourning, In the Dark Room, will be published by Penguin Ireland in 2005
Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction By Dale Peck New Press, 240pp. £13.95
