OK, that’s an obvious headline. Almost cheap, I admit. But it got your attention, right?
Which, at the risk of getting a bit too meta, perfectly distills Dale Peck’s raison d’etre.
His recent squib at Mischief and Mayhem is a perfect summation of why he is utterly dispensable as a critic, as forgettable as he is flamboyant. He represents the worst of the Wieseltier School – the bitterness and the careless, self-defeating rage, without the learned humanity.
On the one hand, it’s probably unfair to hold his brief screed to formal critical standards, since Peck himself admits in the comments that the piece is “lazy”. And given the way he breathlessly updates his post to note a link from the New York Times, it seems he was less interested in substantive commentary and more excited about bomb throwing. (His back and forth about blurb requests just feels petty. Anyone who has spent five minutes in publishing is a bit more savvy about blurbs than that.)
Still, it’s worth asking the question, keeping in line with my earlier post about comments here – why does Peck feel an argument can’t be engaged with, without blanket character assassination? One may fairly disagree with Mendelsohn’s take – some of my readers here have. But a bit like this …
Daniel Mendelsohn—a Princeton-educated classicist who should never be allowed to write about anything more recent than, say, Suetonius. Frankly, I’m not sure he should be allowed to write about the classics either, but I don’t know enough Latin and Greek to say if he’s as wrong about them as he is about modern stuff. Because man is this guy wrong. Always. Every time. Completely off the mark.
… torpedoes any credibility the person making it might have. Anyone who spends five minutes in the NYRB will see that this is the sort of scorched earth idiocy that suggests that Peck’s true métier has all along been blogger, not critic.
Beyond the name calling, Peck’s post is shabby, subpar and, as he admits, lazy. He makes an assertion:
I think that, ultimately, is my problem with Mr. M.: he has no inkling of the problematic but fascinating phenomenon of the postmodern savvy audience—educated to the point of jadedness, suspicious but also sentimental, craving the thing it’s been taught to distrust
It’s an assertion that is both empty and exhausted. First, the term postmodern has been beaten so bloody, waved so relentlessly for decades, that I’m not sure anyone can agree on what it means any more. But Peck lazily relies on presumptions and associations, and then presumes that we will agree with him and see their truth and value. There’s so much assuming going on here, one’s head spins.
If Peck were interested in discussion, he might take a moment and explain this allegedly fascinating phenomenon. But that’s clearly not his game, and I suspect he knows if he were called to make a more substantive argument, he’d fall on his face. Once the insults are over, he runs out of gas.
(It’s also a favorite rhetorical brickbat of the aggrieved, that one who disagrees with us is always characterized as “missing the point.” As though “the point” was so obvious to begin with that any discussion is unnecessary. The term is always a tipoff to impending intellectual dishonesty.)
Obviously, I linked to the Mendelsohn piece earlier because it resonated with me, and confirmed my experience of watching the program. And the essay is considerably more nuanced than Peck’s sneering (or the Times's scandal-baiting) suggests. Still, it can and should be engaged with, and one hopes that more responsible, intelligent and insightful interlocutors will make themselves heard.
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.
Posted by: Niall | February 14, 2011 at 05:43 PM
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.
Posted by: ward | February 15, 2011 at 07:26 AM
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.
Posted by: Bullwinkle | February 15, 2011 at 01:02 PM
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 ...
Posted by: TEV | February 15, 2011 at 02:50 PM
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.
Posted by: Gary | February 15, 2011 at 04:10 PM
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."
Posted by: Jolene | February 16, 2011 at 12:32 PM
I'm sorry, but B.R. Myers is clearly an even more idiotic and pointless critic. Peck is up there though.
Posted by: L. | February 16, 2011 at 02:46 PM
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.
Posted by: D.A. | February 16, 2011 at 04:50 PM
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.
Posted by: P.T. Smith | February 17, 2011 at 08:39 AM
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?
Posted by: It's me—the worst critic of my generation! | March 02, 2011 at 11:34 AM
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.
Posted by: Steve | March 07, 2011 at 07:27 AM
Very well written and explained, still feels like like we are attacking him for no real reason.
Posted by: fire blanket | September 22, 2011 at 06:00 AM