SPEAKING OUT
By Alex Good

Several years ago, while attending a funeral, I found myself buttonholed by a friend of the family who wanted to know what it was like to be a book reviewer. I told her it was just a hobby, but the conversation didn't end with that. What this person really wanted to know was what I thought of Margaret Atwood (meaning, of course, what I thought of Margaret Atwood's writing). Now while I'm usually very free with my opinions, I don't like to sound like the Great Critic when I'm off duty. In this case I deflected the question with a shrug of the shoulders and a casual remark about how I didn't really care for a lot of her stuff.

The funeral guest was transformed. She leaned forward and caught me by the arm, pushing her face close to mine in order to whisper conspiratorially:

"Thank you. Thank you. You can say that because you have a Ph. D."

Such deference surprised me. Was this how Canadians really felt? That they had to have a Ph. D. in English to be allowed an opinion on the books they read? Something else that happened around the same time made me wonder. Reviewing books for a mid-size daily, I usually just drop by the office and help myself to what's new and interesting. When I saw Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet I had no trouble taking a pass. The editor suggested I take it and review it but, having a low opinion of Rushdie, I declined. As a reviewer, you don't want to go looking for bad news. 

The next week I was a little surprised to see it still there. Usually a major release doesn't hang around that long. So when I saw it again on the third week I was well and truly perplexed. I couldn't understand why no one was taking it. The editor again suggested I give it a try - literally pressing it upon me - but again I refused. 

Finally, after a month of this, I had to ask the editor what was going on. This book was a bestseller, I told him, Rushdie one of the most critically celebrated authors of our time. Weren't any of the regular reviewers just a little curious about his latest release?

Well, the editor said in a quiet voice . . . the fact was nobody liked Rushdie, and (here was the thing), they were a little "scared" of writing a bad review.

I don't know if he was just trying to push my buttons, but it worked. I read the book, hated it, and wrote a negative review. But what the editor said stuck with me. People were afraid to write a bad review of Rushdie? What was going on?

I mention all of this as a way of introducing the squabble that has surrounded the publication of B. R. Myers's "A Reader's Manifesto" in the July/August 2001 issue of the Atlantic. Myers's point, in a nutshell, is that many of today's most highly regarded American novelists are pretentious mountebanks, their reputations inflated by a snooty cognoscenti and cultural elite out of touch with reality. In a typical move (but does Myers know how typical?), he laments the triumph of affected literary prose over narrative drive. Pulling quotes from E. Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and David Guterson he mocks a fancy-pants literary prose "so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often requires less concentration than the average 'genre' novel."

In England essays like this are part of what is known as the "condition of the novel" debate, a sort of free-wheeling intellectual bitch-fest that has never caught on in the same way in America (though not for Tom Wolfe's lack of trying). There has, however, already been a lot of response to Myers's manifesto. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post approves, while Joe Siegel of the L. A. Times emphatically does not. Laura Miller at Salon.com thinks the whole question of literary style irrelevant. 

Siegel, defending the difficulty of "serious fiction" from Myers's "phony populism," makes the strongest case, at least in his marshalling of logic. Myers can be quite an ignoramus, and it isn't very hard to poke holes in his essay. It's obvious, for example, that he simply doesn't "get" a book like White Noise. There is certainly a case to be made against DeLillo (even leaving aside trash like The Body Artist), but it's not that he's an incompetent stylist, clichéd thinker or dull humorist. DeLillo's re-casting of Romantic myths of the mind in terms of late twentieth-century consumer society in White Noise is profound, insightful and original. In addition, it is quite a funny book. Sure the part Myers quotes isn't all that amusing, but what about the argument between Jack and his son over whether it's raining out, or Mink dissolving into death throes of mediaspeak? Just what sort of crazy yuks is Myers looking for?

Nevertheless, it's clear that "A Reader's Manifesto" has struck a chord. Myers's supporters have outnumbered his attackers nine to one in letters sent to the Atlantic about the article. And while his manifesto is crude, ill-informed and poorly argued, it does raise a number of valid points. A lot of today's "literary" writing is repetitious, inexact, dull and clichéd. It is also highly formulaic, as witness the success of overblown nurse novels like Cold Mountain and The English Patient. 

But the most important point Myers raises has to do with the failure of the critical establishment. How can one explain reviewers gushing over trash it's hard to believe they've even read? Why do literary awards so often go to pretentious pulp? What this program of misinformation leads to is the state of affairs I began this essay by describing: the confused response of a public, not ignorant, but made to feel unsure of itself in the face of such propaganda. Why, aside from the vagaries of celebrity, should any reader be expected to take David Eggers seriously? Or Zadie Smith? Or Michael Chabon? And yet by all accounts these three are about to duly become our new literary lions, a group of authors that even reviewers will soon be afraid to criticize, if they aren't already. 

Canadian readers will be familiar with the kind of fuss Myers's manifesto has raised. In 1997 Philip Marchand wrote an article for Saturday Night titled "What I Really Think" in which he criticized Canada's leading literary figures for many of the same sins Myers catalogues, including their verbose pomposity. In the title given the Marchand piece - and the headline it received on the front of the magazine: "What a prominent critic honestly thinks" - we get a hint of the real problem. Is it now taken for granted that reviewers don't tell us what they really, honestly think? That the reputations of many of our most critically respected novelists border on the fraudulent is something I very much believe, but who is responsible for that? The authors? Or the tailors of the Emperor's new clothes? The crowd in that story was neither ignorant nor gullible. They knew they were looking at a flabby naked monarch on parade. It's just that he was, after all, the King.

Notes:
Essay first published online August 20, 2001.