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February 14, 2011

Comments

Niall

Did he provoke a similar brouhaha about 10 years ago with his review of Rick Moody's "Demonology"? Or was it The Purple Veil? I forget. Anyway, after that he published a collection of his reviews, and in the introduction to that, he promised to stop writing negative reviews at all. Guess someone fell off the wagon.

ward

Not really interested in a TV review, no matter how good or bad. Maybe that makes me myopic, but hey, I'm a writer, a reader, not a viewer.

Bullwinkle

Calling Mendelsohn NYRB's "lead literary critic" is ludicrous and meaningless. Over the years he has reviewed a handful of contemporary novels at NYRB, but is far more likely to review a film, opera or theater production. That lazy and overblown characterization would in itself be enough to set off alarm bells about Peck's piece.

TEV

Yes, Niall, you are correct. The post headline is a direct reference to the Moody review and he did, indeed, foreswear negative reviews. Though I'm sure he'd say this does not constitute a review proper; merely the ritual flinging of feces that he's made his trademark ...

Gary

Peck is much better in his positive reviews (his recent assessment of Thomas Bernhard in the Sunday Times Book Review was very well written and respectful). His negative reviews remind me of Donald Duck, just sputtering all over himself in aggrieved frustration.

Jolene

When it comes to blowhards like Peck and Mendelsohn, whose pompous criticism and rebuttals leads to 3rd parties rebutting the rebuttals which leads to commenters commenting on the rebuttal of the rebuttal....my gosh, soon enough the subject art is so distorted so mangled beyond recognition, the enjoyment so far removed and forgotten, I find myself, in completely inappropriate contexts, channeling Oyundary Tsagaan: "I simply want to wander through the poem, which I now beg to come to me."

L.

I'm sorry, but B.R. Myers is clearly an even more idiotic and pointless critic. Peck is up there though.

D.A.

I think Myers is a valuable dissenter and he most certainly has a point, L. his point - and I often find myself agreeing - is that writers are getting sloppy and pretentiously "literary." Read something like Tree of Smoke after reading Myers' review, along with all the knee-jerk positive reviews that came out at the time: see if Myers' criticisms don't at least stick with you as you read. He may be more curmudgeonly than he has to be (a function, probably, of feeling like he's in a shrinking minority), but I'm thankful for his antagonistic counterpoint.

P.T. Smith

Gary,

His Bernhard review was a lazy mess too, focused on being clever and privileged, instead of looking at what Bernhard's work was, or god forbid, actually reviewing the books he was supposedly reviewing.

It's me—the worst critic of my generation!

Wow, so now we can't even use the word postmodern, huh? Maybe we just shouldn't talk about anything that happened between, what, 1940 and, um, now?

Not really sure why you're asking me to explain what the UNMENTIONABLE savvy audience is, though, since, you know, you actually quoted it. It's bad enough you want pablum. Do you want someone to spoonfeed you too?

Steve

I read Mendelsohn's piece with a Hallelujah (I feel similarly about Mad Men) and found the piece so impresive that I ended up buying a book of the man's criticism that day.

I'm not sure everything Mendelsohn said in the piece was right (is the acting on the show so very bad?), but I think Peck is wrong to say Mendelsohn's point of reference is 50s-70s tv (by which he implies Mendelsohn is square and out of date). Mendelsohn clearly supports the conventional wisdom that we have a golden age of tv going on right now.

I've been there - being a fan, wanting to lash back at a critic. But Mendelsohn's piece is measured and (what impressed me most) left me feeling like I understood 'good writing' better. It was exhilarating.

fire blanket

Very well written and explained, still feels like like we are attacking him for no real reason.

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TEV DEFINED


  • 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."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."