The Elegant Variation: HE'S BAAAAAAAACK

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February 13, 2004

HE'S BAAAAAAAACK

Apparently Dale Peck's recently announced hanging up of his hatchet only applies to living authors. The dead (no pun intended) are fair game. Only it's not even really about Joyce, is it? It's his cheap way of assaulting modern fiction without naming names. But lo, it's not even that - it really has nothing to do with anyone or anything but Dale Peck's favorite subject: Dale Peck.

One of the most common criticisms I've received about my book reviews, especially from friends, is that I don't say much about the strengths of the writers. And it's true, I don't. Most of the novelists I review had thousands of words devoted to their strengths long before I got around to cataloguing their weaknesses: they don't need me to point them out again. And God knows I've never aspired to anything like impartiality. If anything, I've always considered my flagrant bias to be one of the saving graces of my reviews. If they're extreme in their opinions, that stridency can always be attributed to its author rather than to some pretext of a universal standard. The very extremity of my views does as much to undermine my authority as to enforce it, or at least I hope it does, because I am by no means convinced of the hallowedness of my own ideas. And talent isn't the issue here: content is, and context. It seems to me that there are two strains of literature currently in vogue – what I have referred to, for lack of more authoritative terms, as recherché postmodernism and recidivist realism – and both of them, in my opinion, suck. I'm not interested in pointing out how an author works well in one mode or another, or executes one aspect of one or another mode with a greater or lesser degree of success, because I think the modes need to be thrown out entirely.

The worst part, though, is that underneath all the self-indulgence and chest beating, at the root of the thing, he scores a valid point about the insularity of the contemporary fiction world. It's a point I've raised here before and I am sympathetic to it, but in his case it's so encrusted with his usual bile that I want no part of it or him.

Dale Peck is the worst critic of his generation. Won't he please just shut up and go away?

(Link via Bookslut)

Posted at 09:33 AM | Permalink

Comments

But isn't this exactly what you want him to say? "The very extremity of my views does as much to undermine my authority as to enforce it, or at least I hope it does, because I am by no means convinced of the hallowedness of my own ideas."

Dude, it's a first-person essay about why he wrote the reviews and their context. Of course it's about him. And this strikes me as one of the least self-congratulatory or snide things he's ever said, actually. (The Lord Baby Jesus knows he's said plenty of those.)

Posted by: Choire Sicha | February 13, 2004 at 11:33 AM

Yes he has. And I suppose I'd buy his "uncertainty" a bit more if I trusted his motives. But it all feels so self-consciously and post-emptively (?) quasi-apologetic. I can deal with a righteous prick; I have more problems with one tries to have it both ways. (The piece ultimately feels like part of his ongoing rehabilitation attempt for the Moody review; it inhabits the piece without ever being singled out.) And ultimately, any "authority" he may have perceived he ever had was long ago undermined whether or not he chose to acknowledge it. For someone who's not convinced of his own ideas, his absolutist prescription for abolishing entire schools of literary thought hardly feels like uncertainty. Like I said, I just don't believe him.

Posted by: TEV | February 13, 2004 at 11:54 AM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

February 13, 2004

HE'S BAAAAAAAACK

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

February 13, 2004

HE'S BAAAAAAAACK

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism