The Elegant Variation: NAILED

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June 28, 2004

NAILED

Taking a look at Hatchet Jobs, Daniel Mendelsohn does his usual graceful, nuanced turn over at NYRB. It's a thoughtful piece, the best assessment I've yet read of Peck's strengths and weaknesses, incorporating a look at Peck's own fiction, and suggesting that there's a great deal of humor and style worth your time - even as he acknowledges that in the end it falls short of serious criticism. Frankly, it makes my promised look at Hatchet Jobs all but unnecessary. (But it's still coming, nevertheless.)

Indeed, construction, as opposed to destruction (however entertaining), is not one of Peck's fortes. It must be said that after twelve chapters of hacking away with his hatchet, he doesn't leave much standing, and you start to wonder just what it is he does think is worthwhile. Peck says again and again that he thinks it all went wrong with Joyce: "Ulysses is nothing more than a hoax upon literature, a joint shenanigan of the author and the critical establishment"; on Joyce he blames the current debased state of the novel, stranded (as he believes it to be) between a naive realism, on the one hand, and a postmodern formal gimmickry "that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything." As far as Peck's concerned, "both of them, in my opinion, suck.... I think the modes need to be thrown out entirely." But what he wants to replace them with isn't clear: although he does occasionally betray certain tastes ("the traditional satisfactions of fictional narrative—believable characters, satisfactory storylines, epiphanies and the like," and mumbles something about a "new materialism," he refuses to say what a new "mode" would look like:
My goal was never to offer an alternative model to the kinds of writing I discuss here, because it's precisely when a line is drawn in the sand that people begin to toe it and you fall into the trap of reification, of contemporaneity, an inability to react to changing circumstances.

Given the authority and vehemence of everything that has preceded them, this is evasive.

(Link via Rake's Progress.)

Posted at 11:50 AM | Permalink

Comments

Hi Mark - I agree with you, but I have the feeling from Mendelsohn that, in a way, using his review of Peck, that he wants to show him how it's done, acknowledging Peck's talent for non-fiction, at least, but saying there is no place for starkly negative reviews. If this is not clear, my apologies, but I wrote it out in slightly more detail at:
http://www.budparr.squarespace.com/display/ShowJournalEntry?moduleId=11970&entryId=21015

Posted by: Bud Parr | June 28, 2004 at 05:03 PM

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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

June 28, 2004

NAILED

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

June 28, 2004

NAILED

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