books discussed in this essay
HATCHET JOBS: CUTTING THROUGH CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
by dale peck
new press,
240 pp., $23.95
THE IRRESPONSIBLE SELF: ON LAUGHTER AND THE NOVEL
by james woods
farrar, straus and giroux,
320 pp., $24.00
WHAT literature needs most is a new and abusive school of criticism. So wrote Rebecca West in 1914, in an essay called “The Duty of Harsh Criticism.” Book reviewers were too kind, she argued, and literary standards debased. English departments were remarkable only for the shocking amounts of unreadable writing they produced. Then there was the “formidable army of Englishmen” who had managed to become men of letters without having written anything: “They throw up platitudinous inaugural addresses like wormcasts, they edit the letters of the unprotected dead, and chew once more the more masticated portions of history.” There is now no criticism in England, she concluded. “There is merely a chorus of weak cheers . . . a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger.”
It’s hard to believe West’s essay appeared ninety years ago; what is striking about reading it today is how familiar it sounds. How often have we read articles decrying the unreadability of contemporary English professors? Judith Butler, winner of the 1998 Bad Writing Contest, judged by the academic journal Philosophy and Literature, is only one of several recent high-profile examples. Perhaps there aren’t quite as many inaugural addresses as there were in West’s time (although we may just have replaced them with television book-chat panels). But with that exception, all of West’s complaints will be familiar to anyone who follows contemporary literary debate, as will her central claim that critical discussion is deadened by “the vice of amiability.”
West’s article diagnosed an enduring problem. The essay-review was in part a discussion of The Passionate Friends by H. G. Wells – which she did not enjoy – and in terms of fearless criticism, she may have set an unsurpassable standard. Not only was the author of The Invisible Man one of the most prominent writers of the era, but he and West had recently begun a romance, one that would go on for ten years.
Now seems an especially good moment to recall West. We are once again debating the value of harsh criticism. The current debate was set off by the American critic Dale Peck’s notorious assault on Rick Moody. Peck wrote a review in The New Republic in 2002 that began with the now infamous sentence, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” The ensuing controversy has triggered widespread discussion, including a high-profile counterblast by Heidi Julavits, who, writing in The Believer, held Peck up as an example of “snark,” or mindlessly negative reviewing. Counter-counterblasts have since appeared in The New York Times and across the blogosphere. The subject is sure to receive renewed attention with the imminent publication of Hatchet Jobs, a collection of Peck’s essay-reviews.
The pieces are uniformly merciless. Rick Moody, Peck writes, is not merely the worst writer of his generation; he “has never put together a single sentence that I would call indispensable.” The gentlest moment in Peck’s review of the American writer Stanley Crouch is when he damns Crouch for a “mixed metaphor of . . . bland grandiosity.” The critic Sven Birkerts is lambasted for sentences that “grow simultaneously more turgid and cliché-ridden,” a stylistic habit, Peck goes on to inform us, that “serves to obscure the fact that [Birkerts] is for all intents and purposes talking out of his ass.”
