He's a lover -- and also a hater

Dale Peck, the madman critic famous for his trash jobs on Moody, Eggers and Franzen, talks about forgiving his abusive father in his new "fictional memoir" and wonders why we can't all get along.

By Virginia Vitzthum

Dec 12, 2003 | Dale Peck the novelist keeps digging in, but Peck the critic is backing off the fight for literature's soul. The 36-year-old author has written three well-reviewed, ambitious novels, a handful of short stories, and a new "fictional memoir," "What We Lost," about his father's wretched childhood. But he's better known lately for his long, savage book reviews, particularly one in the New Republic in June 2002 that began, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."

Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody's memoir "The Black Veil"; calling the book "lies" and "criminal," and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as "heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses'; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov ... the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis ... wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's ... and the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of DeLillo."

"Hatchet Jobs," a forthcoming collection of Peck's critical flayings-cum-manifesto, will be Peck's parting shot. He's quitting reviewing in part because he hasn't gotten the response he hoped for. After years of reviews just as withering, the Moody piece for some reason inspired a burst of articles in places like Salon, the Believer and the New York Times. The writers of the "think" pieces for the most part passed up the opportunity to debate the canon or the state of the art, poking instead at nonburning side questions like whether harsh reviewing is nice, or fair, or civil, or appropriate, or hurtful -- or just good fun.

"They just quote the zingers," Peck complains. "I'm quitting because there's no point; I've become this class clown, the guy who hates everything." In the thumb-suckers' defense, it's not always easy to pry Peck's diagnosis of literature's ills from the rhetorical flail of his essays -- he conflates conventional apples like Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides with unreadable oranges like William Gaddis and John Barth; he embraces, denounces and mischaracterizes modernism and postmodernism; he cops out in the afterword to "Hatchet Jobs" with unelaborated pronouncements like "the heart of the novel ... is a diffuse locus of ideas and ideologies loosely tethered to a set of individual visions and personalities" and "literature is an act of revenge that aspires to elegy."

But he's right to lament a certain chilly remove in much serious contemporary literature, and in our interview, he succinctly names the problem as "books that point to other books rather than real life." Literature has gotten insular; the brilliant literary tool of irony has been dulled to a nihilistic-yet-wimpy "whatever"; and too few books, as Peck puts it, "work toward a goal of rendering the truth of human experience rather than the truth of aesthetic expression." He may even be right that a rude and aggressive gay man who grew up in a trailer home gets shut out of "a publishing context that's quicker to embrace [Franzen, Eggers, Wallace, Moody et al.] than it is to embrace me because their message is more palatable."

His strategy of denouncing the competition and the system, however, may backfire onto "What We Lost." Not only has he alienated potential blurbers and reviewers in the cozy literary world; worse, he's misrepresenting himself as a writer. The quality of his fiction is a pleasurable shock if all one's read is his criticism. Moving, as I did, from the confused and nasty reviews (which he writes on a computer) to the clear, taut novels (composed in longhand) is like leaving a clanging boardwalk arcade for the roar and whisper of waves on sand. Peck's fiction writing is visceral, risky yet controlled, lyrical and -- especially in "What We Lost" -- enormously compassionate.

Peck and I spoke in his East Village apartment on a rainy afternoon in November. It was the day "What We Lost" was being released, and he was understandably nervous about revenge-by-review. As it turned out, Andrew O'Hagan's Nov. 16 review in the New York Times Book Review did stink of chickens coming home to roost. O'Hagan bizarrely asserted that "When gay men write about fatherhood, they are often ruminating about manhood," because they won't have children themselves, and then added that "it is not a book about his father's farming episode [the book's ostensible subject] at all, but a rather oblique account of Dale Peck's grapplings with the notion of male authority." Unsupported by anything in the text or even Peck's readily available biographical info (the subtext is certainly Peck's own childhood, not that of his unborn sons), O'Hagan's was not so much a hatchet job as a self-directed hand job. It was as if Peck hadn't written a book: He's gay, so his subject must be childlessness.

Next Page: When Dale Peck Sr.'s younger brother dies in an accident, his mother tells him, "It should have been you"

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