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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
That reconciliation has produced layers of complexity in Peck's fiction, but it may have clouded his judgment as a critic. It's funny and touching how disappointed he is that his reviews didn't spur more literary discourse: Part of him meant those outrageous, often cruel attacks as tough, and toughening, love. "I think I read more closely than 90 percent of the critics working," he says wistfully. Later, he adds, "Jeffrey Eugenides was the only one who responded to anything I said."
He calls his critical method "aggressive misreadings" à la Harold Bloom. "That's how Bloom says literature grows," he explains. "The anxiety of influence produces misreadings which in turn leads to this desire for differentiation that produces new kinds of literature." I'm not sure if this is how Bloom meant it, but Peck's suggestion, from his review of "Infinite Jest," that David Foster Wallace "shut off his goddamn word processor and try to find someone who would passionately shove a dick up his ass" certainly qualifies as aggressive, and is not a reading that ever occurred to me, even when I was most annoyed by Wallace's infinite footnotes.
Another reason Peck expected more literary back-and-forth is that he takes criticism of his own novels very seriously, adjusting when he agrees with a review. His first novel, "Martin and John," came out in 1993 and was widely hailed for its "beauty," "wisdom," and "mastery of literary form ... that belies [Peck's] 25 years." Edmund White called it "the best book of the year," and Michael Cunningham declared the "launch of an important career." The book is a succession of linked stories told about Martin by John, who grows up on a farm with an alcoholic father, Henry, and battered mother, Bea, before moving to New York.
Young Peck focused not on the praise, however, but on the censure, and accordingly reshaped his second novel, which he already knew he wanted to be about a "long, unhappy marriage." "'Law of Enclosures' was responding to my critics, who said the marriage in 'Martin and John' was very black and white," Peck says. "The reviews said the father was this demon and the mother was this victim ... The marriage hadn't gotten the full complex treatment it deserved. I said, 'They're right,' and I tried to rectify it" in his second novel, which also featured Henry and Bea.
When I ask why he's so anxious that his possibly murdered mother not come off like a victim, Peck says, "I think one of the way we perpetuate our hurts is by not looking at the context in which they were produced. One reason my father was so violent is that he could only see how he was wronged and he was going to make other people see that, even if he had to hurt them to do it. When you put things in a larger perspective, you see that the things that happened to you happened in a bigger context."
This echoes what Peck says about postmodernism, which he embraces despite his loathing of postmodern fiction writers like Barth, Gaddis and Pynchon. "The incredibly difficult but I think profound gift of postmodernism is that there's no aspect of human knowledge or existence that can ever be fixed, except that phenomenologically we know we exist," he says. "What postmodernism taught us to do -- and that's why I love Jonathan Safran Foer's novel 'Everything Is Illuminated' so much -- is to locate ourselves in context, not how the realists did or how the modernists did with their stream of consciousness. Rather than looking inward and trying to find out who I am, which is impossible, because we can't see ourselves without prisms of language and culture, you can set up points of reference, maybe through refraction. But your points will constantly change and you have to, too, and that's very real."
I can't help it; I go all Oprah on his ass. Perhaps, I venture, he learned about changing reference points earlier than most people, from a series of mothers and from a father who became someone else when he drank and from the early entwining of love, hate and fear.
Peck replies breezily, "Love and hate and fear are equally intertwined for all people, but I'm very fortunate because I have very vivid stories to dramatize that." He says later, "I write my books in a series, and I'm placing the character of John in greater and greater contexts," he says, perhaps to get to "something more positive." This really is a man writing, as the cliché has it, for his life: Domestic violence is a gift and postmodernism is the religion through which he interprets it.
Late in the afternoon, Peck is raging, not for the first time, about Joyce and DeLillo's bad, aesthetics-over-experience "message," and I ask him, "OK, so what's your message?" He's tired by now from my badgering and the rain and the worry about how "What We Lost" will be received. He sighs. "When you talk about fiction themes you're reduced to statements that are trite or simplistic but true, and my fiction's message is, 'We are all suffering and in our suffering we seem to like to make others suffer too and maybe there's a way around that.'
"What's my message?" The hatchet man shrugs. "'Can't we all be nicer to each other?' But how do you make that true and believable?"
