Here as in so many of these essays, Peck takes on a potentially tricky subject, but precisely because he’s a brawler—temperamentally unafraid to take aim and swing—more often than not he scores a palpable hit.
And yet as much sense as Peck so often makes, there is something awry with this collection, and it’s something his detractors have intuited, too, even if they haven’t articulated it particularly well. (None, it must be said, are as much fun to read as he is.)
There is, to begin with, the problem of overkill. I have no strong opinion either way of Sven Birkerts, and I too thought Rick Moody’s The Black Veil was a sodden mass of pretentiousness and self-indulgence, but as I made my way through Peck’s lengthy excoriations of these authors, it occurred to me that perhaps it might be wasteful to expend many thousands of words on the complete annihilation of writers who are, when all is said and done, not of the first tier. But here and elsewhere, it’s as if Peck can’t stop himself—there’s something manic about the way he pounces on something trivial, something like a misused metaphor (he does go on about one involving the game of horseshoes), and shakes it like a cat shaking a dead mouse. This excess often has the effect of diminishing, or sometimes even eclipsing, the substantive points Peck wants to make. There’s a fascinating passage in which Peck, who thinks very ill of Julian Barnes’s Love, Etc., criticizes the author’s plotting:
In between these two plot points is what appears to be the traditional scenic connective tissue, but even though it clearly delineates the route from there to here…it omits, like a road map, the mountain ranges, out-of-date billboards, and fleeting eye contact with the blonde in the Lexus that distinguish an actual journey from a line on a piece of paper: the traffic jams, the overpriced gas, the toll booths and speeding tickets, the rickety crosses with faded flowers commemorating a highway fatality, the good and bad weather, the good and bad coffee…. For all Barnes’ mechanical delineation of Oliver’s seduction…the key question of attraction is never addressed, and in the end the only discernible reason Gillian invites Oliver in is because Barnes programmed her to do it.
This is a wonderful bit of writing, but two things strike you: first, that by the middle of the passage you (and, you suspect, Peck) have temporarily forgotten just where this metaphorical road trip is headed, and second, that what’s really going on here isn’t so much criticism as a kind of performance—it’s as if Peck wants to show you not what’s wrong with Barnes, but how good a writer he, Peck, is.
The pervasive sense of an underlying competitiveness can sometimes be invigorating, but too often leads to cheap ad hominem attacks. “Need somebody to slog through a second-rate translation of Mandelstam’s journals or The Radetzky March,” he scoffs, “and produce two thousand words to fill that big slot in the middle of the book—for not very much money to boot? Birkerts is your man.” What Sven Birkerts (or anyone else) gets paid for his literary journalism has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of his criticism; “not very much money” is snotty, and has no place in serious criticism. Peck claims at the end of his book that he wants his reviews to be “some kind of dialogue with my generation,” but what kind of dialogue can you have, really, with someone who’s shouting—and kicking?
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 what he sees as 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 occasionally 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.
This is cagey and, you can’t help thinking, disingenuous. All criticism derives, ultimately—whether explicitly or implicitly—from precisely the kind of model that Peck won’t, or can’t, provide here: a standard, a criterion, the intellectual, formal, or generic touchstone by which he evaluates the worth of whatever work he’s considering. The critic’s job is, if anything, to draw lines in the sand, to demarcate the good from the bad, the authentic from the inauthentic; given the authority and vehemence of Peck’s attacks on what he thinks is bad, his coyness about “toeing the line,” his unwillingness to be explicit about what he thinks is good, to describe and justify what his criteria are, is noteworthy.
You wonder, if anything, whether “inability to react to changing circumstances” may be said to characterize Peck’s own position (as much as it’s possible to figure out what it might be). Like his former colleague at The New Republic, the estimable and excellent James Wood, Peck seems to want more novels like the great nineteenth-century novels: serious, impassioned, fat, authoritative. But you can’t write nineteenth-century social novels about twenty-first-century global culture, because the form and preoccupations of the nineteenth-century novel are different from those that might properly interpret the twenty-first century: whatever you think of the self-referential gamesmanship of authors like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, their desire to write books that reflect their own inability to comment on anything but their own inability to comment on anything is a reflection of the anxieties—and realities—of the world in which we actually live. You can call all you want for a return to what is, essentially, a Victorian “materialism,” but to do so is an expression of sentimentality, ultimately; it’s like calling for the return of sixteenth-century Venetian opera or Greek tragedy.
Or, for that matter, Greek comedy. Peck seems, indeed, to be aware of the underlying unsoundness of his aesthetic ideology, because he prefers to do the Aristophanic thing: focusing less on working through a coherent aesthetic than on his showing off his own dazzling performance—while, of course, getting rid of the wrongdoers. He dreams breathlessly of “the excision from the canon, or at least the demotion in status, of most of Joyce, half of Faulkner and Nabokov, nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo.” This fantasy again betrays a surprising intellectual naïveté. Canons aren’t drawn up like shopping lists; they grow organically, just as genres and styles do, out of the soil of the culture that produces them.
Together with his failure to provide a positive picture of what he wants writing to be, the critical metaphors to which Peck resorts—of excision, expulsion, and humiliation (“demotion in status”)—suggest what is, in the end, incomplete about his criticism. For if criticism is, as the word’s etymology suggests, essentially an act of judgment, it seems to me that Peck’s critical writings, for all their intelligence and brio, focus, instead, on what comes after judgment: punishment. There is, indeed, something punitive about his reluctance to let any flaw pass, no matter how trivial it (or the author in question) might be; his words and sentences fall like the blows of a lash.
Or, as he himself put it, of a hammer. In The Law of Enclosures there’s a remarkable passage in which he discusses his relationship with his frightening, powerful father, and the psychological dynamics at play are interesting enough to make the passage worth quoting in full:
Your gifts are fists and curses, your punishments kisses and caresses, and I have grown bitter with your love and sweet with your hatred. You are my god, my father, but I am your bible: I turn your flesh into words, and words have always outlasted the gods who fathered them. I have built you up and I have torn you down, and I can do either again, or neither, or both. Words are my wrenches, words my hammer and nails. Words are my fists, my liquor, my food, and words are my women. With my words I will protect you. I will save you as you have saved me. I save you forever, and for everyone, and for eternity. Dear father, I am saving you now.
Dynamics of power, punishment, and pain between a younger and an older man have recurred in Peck’s work from the beginning: Martin and John contains two arresting descriptions of S&M sex, one of which ends with the younger man begging the older to penetrate him with a shotgun. It is difficult not to see, as the origins of this fascination, the extreme Oedipal tensions at play in the passage from The Law of Enclosures, too: the obsession with power (Peck’s as well as his father’s), the son’s fantasy of being able to punish or save, the constant threat of physical violence both by and against the father (“fists” occurs twice).
All this is worth noting only because of its implications for Peck’s criticism. It’s hard not to feel, in his book reviews, a ferocious kind of acting-out going on. The “hammer and nails” Peck mentions in the passage above seem intended not so much for constructing something—the way you’re tempted at first to read this passage—as for crucifying someone; and indeed, you sense that what Peck the critic really wants to do when he picks up a book to review isn’t so much to judge the writer as to nail the guy. (In this context, it is surely interesting that the writer he singles out for unambiguous praise, meant to serve as a kind of capstone to the collection, is a woman, Rebecca Brown, who wrote a memoir of her mother’s death.)
There’s no denying that all that hammering yields a lot of pleasure for Peck’s readers; but it’s not the road to serious critical work—if, of course, that’s what Peck wants. (Two pages into Hatchet Jobs, he declares that he “will no longer write negative book reviews”—“I am throwing away my red pen”—a showy gesture which suggests that his foray into criticism wasn’t much more than a performance after all.) Even Aristophanes—who was, we should remember, a comedian and not a critic—seems to have been made uneasy by the sadistic aspects of criticism. “I cannot judge them any more,” his Dionysos apologizes when the word-weighing is over. “I must not lose the love of either one of them. / One of them’s a great poet. I like the other one.” The lines remind you that loving and liking are as much a part of criticism as are hating and hacking; and that the impulse underlying good criticism ought to be affection for literature rather than animus toward writers. After his novels, after his memoir, and especially after Hatchet Jobs, we know pretty well whom Peck has hated, and why. Now it’s time to say goodbye. The serious critic, after all, is measured—and judged—as much by what and how he praises as by what and how he blames; and he should be as stimulated by the pleasure he gets from his reading as he is by the pain.
—The New York Review of Books, July 15, 2004
The Way Out
At the beginning of Philip Roth’s 1979 novella The Ghost Writer, the twenty-three-year-old narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, tremulously approaches the secluded New England home of a famous but reclusive Jewish writer, E. I. Lonoff. Of this Lonoff we are told that he has long ago forsaken his urban, immigrant roots—the cultural soil from which, we are meant to understand, his vaguely Bashevis Singeresque fiction sprang—for “a clapboard farmhouse…at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires.” Long out of circulation, he is considered comical by New York literary people for having “lived all these years ‘in the country’—that is to say, in the goyish wilderness of birds and trees where America began and long ago had ended.” Still, young Nathan, an aspiring novelist, admires Lonoff extravagantly, not only because of “the tenacity that had kept him writing his own kind of stories all that time,” but because
having been “discovered” and popularized, he refused all awards and degrees, declined membership in all honorary institutions, granted no public interviews, and chose not to be photographed, as though to associate his face with his fiction were a ridiculous irrelevancy.
A young man’s admiration; a young man’s perhaps self-congratulatory idealization of a figure who, it is all too clear, he would like one day to be.
If, thirty years ago, readers felt safe in identifying the ingenuous, ambitious, hugely talented Newark-born Nathan Zuckerman with his creator—Zuckerman indeed went on to become the hero of an impressive number of subsequent novels focused on the sexual, artistic, cultural, and moral life of the American Jewish male—anyone familiar with Roth’s recent biography will find it difficult not to identify the author today with Lonoff. Like the fictional writer, Roth is a novelist whose work is profoundly rooted in Jewishness (however much Jewishness may be questioned, berated, and rejected in it); like Lonoff, Roth has ended up living “in the country”—not far from the Berkshires, in fact (whither the elderly, ailing Nathan Zuckerman also eventually repairs, in a much later novel); as with Lonoff, the recent biography suggests an aversion, if not to honors and awards (of which Roth has many), then to the whirl of New York literary life, to the ridiculously irrelevant ephemera of being a major figure in the culture. A recent profile of Roth in The New York Times, timed to coincide with the publication this month of the short novel Everyman, his twenty-seventh book, makes a point of noting that the new book is one of the rare ones in which Roth has permitted an author photograph to appear.
And as with Lonoff, there is a sense of the literary lion become, suddenly, the lion in winter. There is, to my mind, a kind of caesura in the Roth corpus that falls exactly in the middle of the 1990s. The first half of the decade saw the publication of two novels that, between them, embody the major themes of Roth’s work. In 1993 Roth published the dazzling Operation Shylock, a brilliant parable about the meaning of identities Jewish, artistic, and cultural: in it, the narrator, ostensibly Roth himself, sets out to find and confront a Philip Roth impersonator who is also a prophet of something called “Diasporism,” an ideology promoting the return of Israelis to their European countries of origin. (All this, to raise the stakes even higher, is set against the trial of the concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, charged with being Ivan the Terrible, “the butcher of Treblinka.”) The connection between eros and art, always a crucial one in Roth’s fictional world, was subsequently explored, with equally outré gusto, in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), whose protagonist is a onetime puppeteer and self-described “dirty old man.” The former book won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the latter, the National Book Award for fiction.
Since then—starting in 1997, when Roth, then in his mid-sixties, published his Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (the first installment of a nostalgic trilogy, largely about the failure of the American Dream, which also included I Married a Communist, a look back at the Fifties, and The Human Stain, in part a sour indictment of political correctness)—the roiling, libidinous energies and aggressive intellectual dazzle of what could be described as Roth’s middle period, the period that culminated in Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater, have yielded more and more to a distinctly elegiac mode. It’s not that the books necessarily have any less vivacity, any less imaginative brilliance (the latter amply demonstrated by the publication, in 2004, of his counterhistorical Nazified America fantasy The Plot Against America); it’s merely that they seem, suddenly, to be written by someone who’s closer to the periphery than to the center of things, who’s looking back in resignation, or anger, or both. However vivid its depiction of the tumult of Sixties political fervor, the dominant note sounded in American Pastoral was one of idealized nostalgia—hardly untypical for this author—for the Depression-era work ethos recalled from his childhood, the ethos that was frayed during the decade the novel depicts. Similarly, in T
he Human Stain there was a tension between grouchy disdain for the novel’s present-day fictional setting (politically correct academia, circa 1990) and a golden-toned reverie about the solid values of the past: in this case, the values of an aspiring black railway porter, father to the protagonist, values that have been upended and mocked by the sanctimoniousness of the present.
It occurred to you, as you read these novels and those that followed—particularly The Dying Animal (2001), which finds a recurrent Roth hero, the libidinous cultural critic David Kepesh, “nearing death” and, even worse, appalled to realize that the voluptuous Cuban-American student with whom he carries on an obsessive affair is mortal, too—that they were the work of an author facing his seventies. An autumnal frost had set in.
Roth himself has been outspoken, of late, about his preoccupation with death. In the Times profile he talked at length about the “gigantic shock” of finding himself at an age when his friends are dying, it would seem, en masse (in the book, he indeed describes old age as a “massacre”):
This book came out of what was all around me, which was something I never expected—that my friends would die. If you’re lucky, your grandparents will die when you’re, say, in college. Mine died when I was a schoolboy. If you’re lucky, your parents will live until you’re somewhere in your 50’s; if you’re very lucky, into your 60’s. You won’t ever die, and your children, certainly, will never die before you. That’s the deal, that’s the contract. But in this contract nothing is written about your friends, so when they start dying, it’s a gigantic shock.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 21