The war for the soul of literature

The bit about "wine-and-cheese parties" really sets Peck off. It seems a pretty obvious reference to faculty parties and the university teaching jobs where the writers of a previous generation of postmodern novelists -- Robert Coover and John Barth are two -- ended up when their work failed to set the world on fire. It's pretty easy to imagine the routine griping that goes on in such environs. But Peck mistakenly thinks that Wallace is imagining happy clans of gay and lesbian or immigrant or African-American novelists "who seem to be living it up with our 'subcultures' at wine-and-cheese parties he's not invited to." This tumbles into a tirade about Wallace's book advance and the awards he's won (and even a weird fillip at the end about how many dicks Gore Vidal has sucked, presumably because this lends greater credibility to Vidal's own complaints about the irrelevance of the novel).

This is only the most white-hot example of how Peck's own sense of exclusion effloresces into incoherent rage. In the same essay, he dwells on Wallace's sales figures (as compared to Norman Mailer's) and enthusiastic press. In the book's introduction, he lays into Believer magazine editor Heidi Julavits for deploring the "razed landscape" of contemporary book reviewing. "Such a sentiment," Peck retorts, "seems slightly out of place in the context of Richard Ford, Rick Moody, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace -- not to mention Ms. Julavits and [Dave] Eggers -- who all earn millions of dollars by selling many, many copies of their work." This is delusional. Only one or perhaps two writers on this list could reasonably be said to earn "millions of dollars" in this way, and some of them are, I'm sure, painfully aware that the copies sold of their work cannot be described as "many," let alone "many, many."

But they sell more copies than Dale Peck, and this seems to be the point of such outbursts. What's more, quite a few of the writers Peck lambastes in "Hatchet Jobs" run in the same crowd and get celebrated (sometimes) by the same critics. It is Peck who hasn't been invited to the wine-and-cheese party, and while you can't blame him for resenting this (he's only human), it's impossible to extract the resentment from his criticism of their books without the whole fabric unraveling. His afterword, in which he claims to be fighting for the liberation of contemporary fiction from its disastrous enthrallment to the modernist model epitomized by James Joyce's "Ulysses," is just silly bravado (and I write this as someone who thinks such a liberation wouldn't be a bad idea).

Peck refuses to elaborate on what this rescued fiction might look like, because, he says, he wants to avoid the "trap of reification, of contemporaneity, an inability to react to changing circumstances." When reading such a funny, colloquial and visceral critic, you can be pretty sure that the length of the words he uses is in direct proportion to the bullshit he's dispensing. More likely, such evasions are his "education in deconstruction," mentioned earlier in the book, coming to the surface. In the academia of poststructuralist theory, you learn to stay always on the attack; those who risk standing up for something will soon become a target themselves, and Peck hasn't even managed to save himself from that.

So there's a lot of attitudinizing to hack through before you get to the core of Peck's objections to recherché postmodernism, and it turns out to be much the same as Wood's: The maximalist novel is too long and too digressive, and it is about ideas not people. (One difference is that Peck thinks this is elitist, while Wood thinks it's not rarefied enough.) If you disagree (and in many, if not all, instances, I do), you hit a wall. "Infinite Jest," "The Corrections" and "White Teeth" are in fact ripe with humanity, and their digressions and disquisitions are not tiresome but delightful. So there.

It is a silly impasse, the one where taste cannot be accounted for and the sides resort to hurling insults. That's where, for all his textual analyses, you wind up with Peck, but not with Wood. Wood's criticism enriches the understanding of those who don't agree with him; Peck's is content to stoke the righteous indignation of those who do.

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