Should We Bury the Hatchet? Good God, Of Course We Shouldn't

By Stefan R. Beck | Wednesday, January 14, 2004

John Dennis, in "Reflections Critical and Satyrical" on Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism," wrote, "I will not deny but that there are two or three Passages in it with which I am not displeas'd; but what are two or three Passages as to a whole? ... That little that is good in him does but set off its contrary, and make it appear more extravagent." That Dennis was largely mistaken about Pope's poem is past dispute. Yet had he been our contemporary, and writing about, let's say, DBC "Dirty But Clean" Pierre's Vernon God Little, we might be inclined to nod and say, "Yes, ignore the good bits and get mean."

Full disclosure: I've only read a page of Vernon God Little, and the jacket copy. The first page sent my attention in every other direction—a Rubik's cube, a game of Internet Scrabble, an episode of Rich Girls, whatever.

The copy and approving blurb from Jonathan Lethem sent me into a delirious rage. Was it the overblown subtitle, "A Twenty-First Century Comedy in the Presence of Death"? Or the winking, Eggersian assurance that VGL is "quite possibly the only novel to be set in the barbecue-sauce capital of Central Texas"? The copy telegraphs Pierre's not-so-novel themes: media bad, authenticity good. When Lethem tells us it's "Flannery O'Connor on an overdose of ampethamines and cable television," we think only of a great writer made retarded by trailer-park meth and Dynasty reruns. Southern Gothic gone Texas Garbage.

I could be wrong—I didn't read it. But the deck is solidly stacked against my enjoying it, and time is limited, so shouldn't I take on something likely to be good? Not necessarily. As Dennis's words suggest, there's something both instructive and acutely pleasurable about the wholesale destruction of a lousy book. Long before Pope and Dennis had it out, Martin Luther observed that "[i]t is an old custom to burn bad books." Book-burning is retardataire, with all its fascist connotations, but now there's a better custom: the bad review.

Make that the not-just-bad review—the review armed with serrated teeth, curare-tipped darts, and bristling ad hominem attacks. The prototype, according to a July 2003 New Yorker piece by Rachel Cohen, is a forty-one page review by John Churton Collins of a book (the name's no longer important) by Edmund Gosse. Gosse wrote to Thomas Hardy that he had been "felled, flayed, eviscerated, pulverized and blown to the winds." That was no exaggeration. It was a career-busting piece. Yet, as Cohen notes, "Collin's review didn't just devastate; it revealed." To reveal should be the aim of any review. The devastation—the collateral damage—is a bonus.

So why didn't I try to eviscerate VGL? Much as I enjoy burning a bad book, there must be rules. The first is that there's no sense blowing a JDAM on an aspirin factory (or, in this case, an Ambien factory). In spite of (because of?) its Booker Prize, VGL and its author have been forgotten. DBC Pierre likely will meet his end in the sophomore swamp, joining the mummified failures of Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith. What's the point?

Whether or not the "hatchet job" is an acceptable form of literary criticism has been widely considered. Dale Peck, who made his name brutalizing bad books (his collected criticism, Hatchet Jobs, will be published in May), stands on one side of the critical trench. On the other side we have the Believer crowd (I include here Dave Eggers and his McSweeney's drones), responsible for the launch of anti-hatchet Snarkwatch (www.believermag.com/snarkwatch/index.htm), a site dedicated to refuting "snarky" (unfair) "critical activity." The fight being waged between the hatchets and the feather dusters may come to affect the critical landscape.

Who do I stand with? As I've said, there must be rules, but it will be clear by now that I lean toward the Peck camp. I enjoy good books and bad reviews. Toward establishing guidelines, I've selected several of my favorite hatchet jobs. Each reveals something about the trajectory of fiction today, and about the use and function of criticism.

The vile pollution that is Chuck Klosterman might never have been neutralized, had it not been for a surpassingly vicious treatment in the New York Press. The August 28, 2003 issue of NYP had for its cover a horrifying close-up of Klosterman's face, crowned with the words Please Kill Me. Was that de trop? You won't think so once you've read Mark Ames's review, a delightful gloves-off treatment Klosterman's paean to krap kulture, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. (If the title alone makes you cringe, you're a dying breed—I salute you.) Here's an exemplary passage from Ames's review:

Underlying this lame...media criticism is the false notion that other people, not Chuck of course, are incapable of distinguishing media fictions from reality—a stupid premise that was marginally interesting long ago in the hands of Barthes, Baudrillard and Gitlin, but deserving of a milkshake on the head in the case of Klosterman. Only hack media critics believe that "regular" people are somehow more susceptible to the pop culture bacillus than they are, probably because they don't spend time among these "regular" people.

Klosterman is one of those hipster doofi who think there's something unusual about the way they've been absorbing and commenting on T.V. infotainment for the last ten years. So we get a collection of observations too trivial even to relay to our friends. To this Mark Ames says: Enough. We're done with zaniness, pop-trash poison, and Barthes Lite. Ames's savage review is a roundhouse punch to the disingenuous, attention-grabbing kookiness that pervades literary culture.

Snarkwatch didn't know what hit 'em: "What the hell was that?" asked Don Hoyt Gorman, who whined about the "puerile fumes of Ames's copy." This hints at a basic requirement of a bad review: a sense of proportion. If a book, like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, is merely stupid, it does not warrant the gravity of a careful, line-by-line analysis. It needs a gut reaction—a hard, below-the-belt blow.

Max Watman, author of the "Fiction chronicle" for The New Criterion, clearly understood that when he wrote "Flamboyantly humble," a review of Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity. Truth be told, the review does take into account Eggers's actual proficiencies as a writer, and it presents a fair assessment. Still, knowing as he does that Eggers's talents are limited—while his vanities and ugly quirks are boundless—Watman spends a good deal of his piece focusing on extratextual points. We learn that the book has a natural gray cardboard cover, with the first paragraph of the book printed on it in capital letters. The front-cover endpaper picks up the text. One is tempted to make comparisons to early Surrealist experiments with type, but remembers that actual type was a little trickier. When Sylvia Beach and James Joyce labored over the huge "S" ("Stately, plump"), they were laboring with blocks and lead, not simply increasing the font size in a floating palette in their desktop-publishing software. Eggers's trick was easy to do, and does not warrant comparison to anything.

Watman also riffs on the author photo from Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: "'Don't look at me, look at these two dogs, and this odd bird on my shoulder.' The bio states that Eggers has no pets." Eggers's may wonder why his product design is thus scrutinized. But Watman is expert at picking up on little details that reflect and magnify authorial shortcomings. If an author's personality is offensive—if he's obsessed with appearances, or if he constantly distances himself with calculated whimsy—the writing will suffer by it. When soft-edged critics pule about "personal attacks," they deny this fact.

Because it's healthy to weed the garden of up-and-coming "talents," Eggers was an obvious choice for Watman's spade. But what of well-established authors? Is a critic required to be charitable?

Critic and novelist Tibor Fischer put that question to the test when he slammed Martin Amis's Yellow Dog in the Telegraph. (Once upon a time, Amis was a favorite of mine; when Yellow Dog came my way this summer, I couldn't get past the first five pages.) Fischer loved Amis, "one of the few living writers [Fischer] can quote from memory." He was "genuinely saddened" that Yellow Dog was "not-knowing-where-to-look bad," that it was like "your favorite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." He penned his review while the book was still embargoed, so he couldn't point to the things that turned his stomach. Given that, was it unfair?

In the Guardian, Stephanie Merritt wrote up an interview with Fischer, which focused mainly on one question: Can you do better? Fischer's latest book had been released the same day as Yellow Dog (a fact Fischer acknowledged in his review), and the concern was that Fischer was lashing out at Amis as a PR stunt.

This isn't the whole story. Fischer's response to Yellow Dog sounds heartfelt, an "emperor-has-no-clothes" outcry bent on reversing the depressing decline of Amis's performance. A great writer should be reminded from time to time that the rules still apply—lest he come to think, as Picasso did, that his napkin scribble could buy a whole restaurant. Extreme as Fischer's review was, it was a counterbalance to the fawning other critics were likely to do.

Fischer was put in a bad position. He said what he meant, yes, but it's all to easy to dismiss him as an embittered, unsuccessful novelist, a gnat raging at a rhinoceros. Not so in the case of critic James Wood. Wood's first novel, The Book Against God, met with a reasonable degree of success; it seemed nobody felt big enough to administer the Big Payback. Not surprising: Wood is, bar none, the titan of the critical world, with a pitch-perfect ear for language, a solid grasp of the novel's mechanics, and near-impeccable judgment. He's fearless, smashing the clay feet of giants like Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and John Updike. He's also dispassionate, dissecting a bad book the way a coroner looks for a cause of death.

Nearly any of Wood's bad reviews could show us how it's done. But a personal favorite of mine—Wood's London Review of Books piece on Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man—also shows us why it's done. Why did Wood deploy his critical arsenal on a sophomore effort (one roundly denounced, too) by a young, so-so writer? Wood does not put a single book on trial. He identifies a trend, a lurch toward soulless triviality threatening all of contemporary fiction. In his review, Wood calls this "irrelevant intensity," stating that, "In fiction, information has become the new character, and information is endless." (In a Guardian piece several days later, Wood called the style of Smith, the McSweeney's people, David Foster Wallace, and so on "hysterical realism," "characterised by a fear of silence" and "a pursuit of vitality at all costs.") His parody of hysterical realism is the cruelest and funniest part of his Autograph Man review; here is an excerpt:

Brian idly fingered the minibar. It was happily 'chugging' (though was 'chugging' exactly the right word?) to itself as if it had actually already drunk its entire contents. The minibar was one of that weird genre that tells you that as soon as you move anything in it, anything at all, you will be automatically billed. Brian wondered about this: how would they—they being the Loews Hotel accountants who worked out of a large and famously hideous building in Newark, though probably in fact the information was logged somewhere like Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur—how would they know that you had moved, say, the tiny bottle of Johnnie Walker to where the tiny bottle of Smirnoff was standing? Like, thought Brian, would an alarm go off? He plucked a bottle of Budweiser. Nothing happened. The strange pathos of cold beer bottles in lonely hotel rooms! The bottle was shaped like a beautiful woman...

The Autograph Man, says Wood, is "better written, but she had two years, and I had two minutes."

In the Guardian, Smith responded to Wood's "hysterical realism" blow, calling it a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth..." She wasn't exactly converted on the spot, but the acknowledgement is a start. It demonstrates the transformative power of a well-placed kick. Perhaps all the Smiths and Eggerses of the world will read Wood's parody, and come to learn there's nothing special or singular—or praiseworthy—about the hysterical style. Perhaps things will change.

Or perhaps not. But so long as there are critics like James Wood out there, the writing life will be that much more difficult for those who take the easy route, and who in doing so corrupt the art of fiction. Without the hatchet job, the literary landscape would be choked and overgrown with bad books, and with the craven back-patting reviews that make everybody that much lazier. For a writer, the sting of a bad review is temporary. For the reading public, the numbing dullness of bad books is far more difficult to get over.

Should We Bury the Hatchet? Good God, Of Course We Shouldn't

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