The war for the soul of literature

Wood's horror of this world so blinds him that he wrongly singles out as an example of mere "smirking" a passage in Franzen's "The Corrections." In it, a character ruminates on "corporate gardens," manicured spaces he has enjoyed as "backdrops for the pageant of privilege" while knowing that it is "vital not to come to them in need." The lines reflect this man's wary attitude toward the business he works in. Minus one (admittedly too fancy) word, the passage conveys just the sort of revelation that Wood would marvel over if it instead described Sicilian peasants or the withering remnants of the pre-Revolutionary Russian aristocracy. But he can't see this because he is offended at being made to consider corporate plazas as an unavoidable fixture of life. "Who would ever 'ask too much'" of one, he asks furiously, when the answer is obvious: Someone who had noplace else to go at the moment -- that is, a disconsolate white-collar worker, the sort of person this character half-fears he may one day be.

The line between the amusingly clever and the too clever, between the interesting description and the egregious info-dump, can only be plotted subjectively. Criticism's task is to articulate that subjectivity so that even those who don't share it can see it in three dimensions. Wood does this beautifully, he erects a critical structure that's undeniably coherent; you can walk in and have a look around. It's just that once you get inside, the accommodations turn out to be pretty Spartan and the window shades are always pulled down.

With Dale Peck, we're talking about subjectivity of an entirely different order. He is notorious for commencing his reviews with rhetorical detonations ("Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation" being the most famous example). What provokes less comment is his penchant for backpedaling later on in the piece (or in later statements), allowing that the author in question has talent or something valid to say, and is simply so grievously misguided that only a fearsome critical walloping can possibly knock him back on track. Critics have not hesitated to point out that Peck's "I'm only beating you for your own good" stance resonates creepily with his autobiographical writings about his abusive father.

But Peck isn't merely a bully, and he certainly isn't stupid. Whatever authority others invest in him as an occasional reviewer at the New Republic, he still feels like an outsider, and with cause. He is a gay man from a working-class background and, perhaps hardest of all, a minor novelist, well acquainted with the business end of a stinging review. When he isn't hopelessly enmeshed in his own tangled motivations, he can be an astute and even sensitive critic. His essay on Kurt Vonnegut, one of only two approving pieces in the otherwise aptly titled "Hatchet Jobs," is moving and rather brave; for a critic so intent on demonstrating his own intellect and discrimination, it takes some guts to embrace an author often written off as middlebrow.

Most of the essays in "Hatchet Jobs" lack that kind of courage or clarity, however. Whatever flashes of wit and perception Peck shows, and notwithstanding the extensive knowledge of English grammar and nonreproductive sexual practices he makes a point of showing off whenever possible, the emotional tone here most powerfully suggests the diary of a bright but angry 14-year-old girl. It is petulant and muddled and, underneath that, hurt.

So great is the sway of these feelings that Peck, who obviously prides himself on his close readings, makes a particularly telling mistake. He's quoting a passage from Franzen's 1996 Harper's essay that in turn quotes a letter from David Foster Wallace, whose novel Peck is reviewing. Wallace is lamenting the difficulty of finding "any real sort of felt community" in "a contemporary culture of mass-marketed images and atomized self-interest." Wallace writes that "we're all alienated," but that "the guys who write directly about and at the present culture" -- who are, he says, mostly straight white men -- are particularly confused because they are supposed to constitute the mainstream and therefore can't even find solidarity in an oppositional subculture. "It's not just something to bitch about at wine-and-cheese parties," he insists.

Next Page: Peck labors under the delusion that the authors he despises are selling "many, many" copies and making "millions of dollars"

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