Contents
Myers described the original article as "a light-hearted polemic" about modern literature. Myers was particularly concerned with what he saw as the growing pretentiousness of American literary fiction. He was skeptical about the value showcased by elaborate, allusive prose works and argued that what was praised as good writing was in fact the epitome of bad writing.
His critique concentrated on Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, David Guterson, and Don DeLillo, [5] all of whom enjoyed substantial acclaim from the literary establishment. [6] [7] Myers directed many of his harshest charges at literary critics for prestigious publications such as The New York Times Book Review , whom he accused of lavishing praise upon bad writing either for political reasons, or because they did not understand it and therefore assumed it to have great artistic merit. Myers also focuses on what he calls "the cult of the sentence", criticizing critics for pulling single sentences out of novels in order to praise their brilliance, while ignoring shortcomings in the novel as a whole.
Author critiques
Myers explains and critiques several prose styles, each focused on a specific author.
Annie Proulx
Myers accuses Annie Proulx of using nonsensical images, mixed metaphors, and poor word choice. Myers claims Proulx writes to "startle or impress the reader", asserting that this sort of writing must be read quickly so the meaning of the sentences does not fall apart. "With good Mandarin prose the opposite is true," Myers says, comparing Proulx's writing unfavorably with that of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Myers criticizes Proulx for being "too egocentric" to put herself in the place of her characters when deciding what is important and what is unnecessary. He also mentions that Proulx writes one thing but means something else, implying Proulx has a lack of polish. Myers writes, "Someone needs to tell her that half of good writing is knowing what to leave out".
Don DeLillo
Meyers accuses Don DeLillo of lacking in the "edginess" that critics praise him for, since DeLillo writes on themes of anti-consumerism, a topic that has been explored in literature since the 1950s. Myers asserts that DeLillo's characters serve primarily as vessels for DeLillo's thoughts, rather than as discrete characters. DeLillo, according to Myers, attempts to persuade his readers that if something does not make sense it is "over their heads," or that "something as inadequate as language can never do justice to the complexity of what they're trying to say." Myers also points out that DeLillo uses a slippery sense of irony in his writing, "As so often with DeLillo's musings, the 'conclusion' is phrased as a rhetorical question. 'If this works for you, take it,' he is saying, 'but if you think it's silly, hey—maybe I do too.'"
Cormac McCarthy
Myers accuses Cormac McCarthy of filling his sentences with bulky words that contain no real detail or meaning. He uses the following as an example, from The Crossing:
"He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her."
Myers writes:
"This is a good example of what I call the andelope: a breathless string of simple declarative statements linked by the conjunction 'and'. Like the 'evocative' slide-show and the Consumerland shopping-list, the andelope encourages skim-reading while keeping up the appearance of 'literary' length and complexity. But like the slide-show (and unlike the shopping-list), the andelope often clashes with the subject matter, and the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the methodical meal that is being described."
McCarthy's prose, Myers quips, "is unspeakable in every sense of the word," implying that it is both awful and frequently difficult to imagine a person saying. McCarthy's use of archaisms is also brought under scrutiny.
Paul Auster
Myers suggests that Paul Auster over-describes situations, especially mentioning numerous details that are particularly mundane and obvious. By making a description too long, as Auster does, Myers says that an author encourages a reader to "feel emboldened to ask why it needed to be said at all." Myers accuses Auster of "simply wasting our time" with his wordiness. Myers states that dragging on a point too long might cause it to go stale, as it did in Auster's passage from Timbuktu . With an example from Auster's Moon Palace , Myers describes how too many big and fancy words, used incorrectly, can discredit the speaker's intelligence. Myers also criticizes Auster for saying the same thing too many times. He states, "Swing the hammer often enough, and you're bound to hit the nail on the head sometime—or so Auster seems to think."
David Guterson
Myers critiques David Guterson's novel Snow Falling on Cedars [8] mainly for its "sluggishness" of words and "echoic" thought process. Myers concludes that Snow Falling on Cedars is no more than "flat, stereotypical descriptions" of characters in a given context, and, were its pace not slow, it would be considered a genre novel. Myers criticizes Guterson's average descriptions of predictable characters that have often been explored in literature and complains that Guterson brings nothing new to the characters or story.
Other critiques and recommendations
In addition to these critiques, Myers also criticizes Thomas Wolfe, Jay McInerney, and Rick Moody.
As examples of books with a style preferred by Myers, he lists, among others, To the Lighthouse , Those Barren Leaves , The Adventures of Augie March , The Victim , The Man Without Qualities , Le Père Goriot , Illusions perdues , La Comédie humaine , The Orchard Keeper (by previously criticized author Cormac McCarthy), Moby-Dick , Malone Dies , and Gormenghast .
Rebuttals to previous criticism
Myers devotes a section of the book-length text to describing the response the shorter version published in the Atlantic Monthly received upon its publication. This portion of the book is an analysis of the criticisms of his original critique, and while it is written with Myers' characteristic "humor", it is the place in the book where he most aggressively defends his views.
Myers' critics call him a philistine and an advocate for low-brow literature, and suggest that his criteria for good literature implicitly define it as writing that is simple enough to require little effort to read. Myers responds that books may also be difficult to read because of poor writing style, and he recommends other authors as examples of a complex style executed with skill.
Several critics claim the authors Myers featured were already discounted by the literary establishment. Myers was unable to find any evidence backing this claim, and responds to this argument with the absence of criticism for the authors and several examples of praise.
Critics suggest that the ambiguity Myers criticizes contains the value of the works: "consoling riddles", as one critic calls them. Myers rebuts, "Literature need not answer every question it raises, but questions themselves should be clear." "Difficult lucidity," in Myers' opinion, is what is missing from contemporary prose—the kind of writing that, as he says, "rewards the use of a dictionary instead of punishing it."
Myers responds to criticism that his complaints "evinced faulty judgment". Myers points out that the critics made no attempt to argue that the defamed excerpts deserved the praise originally lavished on them.
Some critics say that Myers is too harsh and negative in his reviews and that he looks at the substandard rather than the good sections of a literary work. Myers refutes these criticisms by stating that he uses the same excerpts that were previously praised by other critics. He also explains that some good parts do not qualify a work of literary prose as being worth the money and time it costs to purchase and read. Myers claims that the writer has become more important than the writing and any failings "only makes them more lovable" in the eyes of the modern critic.
Critics charge Myers with living in an "imagined past", in which all the authors were more talented. Myers agrees to a point, but gives the example of the National Book Award winners between 1990 and 2001 compared to those of 1950 through 1961 winners, stating, "Prize committees have always been unreliable judges of quality... still, it's worth noting that there was too much good writing around in the 1950s for even the prize committees to miss."
Myers' critics accuse him of putting too much emphasis on reality. Myers responds, "I love it when Bulgakov makes a cat talk, and when Gogol dresses a nose in a civil servant's uniform, and—if I may jerk the chain again—when Stephen King gives a car a mind of its own." He says that he instead, "points out how absurd it is for the narrator of DeLillo's The Names , the usual 'elliptical' windbag, to claim that lying about one's destination creates a grave disparity in the listener's brain between the real and the false destination. In making this point I was merely judging The Names—as I judge every novel—by its own standards, in this case as a novel of serious ideas. (DeLillo himself has said that it represents 'a deeper level of seriousness.')"
Myers received attacks on his history and character for his essay. For example, Judith Shulevitz criticized Myers for being a foreigner (he was an Army brat), unacquainted with the literary establishment he criticized. In response, Myers claimed that in these literary circles, social identity is more important than writing. Myers believes instead that a reader should trust his/her reason and intelligence to judge the writing, without necessarily being swayed by the "reputation" of the author.
List of rules
Myers provides a list of rules at the end of the book, an ironic set of guidelines for writing, corresponding to prose criticized earlier in the book. Myers implies that following the rules will lead to literary success. The listed rules are "Be Writerly", "Sprawl", "Equivocate", "Mystify", "Keep Sentences Long", "Repeat yourself", "Pile on the Imagery", "Archaize", "Bore", and "Play the part".
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American writer and film director. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
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Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist. His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
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Richard Cory Kostelanetz is an American artist, author, and critic.
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"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" is an essay by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the November 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine criticizing the American literary establishment for retreating from realism.
J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings had an initial mixed literary reception. Despite some enthusiastic early reviews from supporters such as W. H. Auden, Iris Murdoch, and C. S. Lewis, literary hostility to Tolkien quickly became acute and continued until the start of the 21st century. From 1982, Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey and Verlyn Flieger began to roll back the hostility, defending Tolkien, rebutting the critics' attacks and analysing what they saw as good qualities in Tolkien's writing.
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Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today is a 1980 book by literary critic Geoffrey Hartman. In the book, Hartman argues for literary criticism to be taken as seriously as a form of creative literature in its own right, and he discusses the difficulties that literature professors face in the contemporary American university.
The Emergence of African Fiction is a 1972 academic monograph by American scholar Charles R. Larson. It was published initially by Indiana University Press, and again, in a slightly revised edition, in 1978 by Macmillan. Larson's study has elicited very different responses: it was praised as an early and important book in the study and appreciation of African literature in the West, but for others it remained stuck in a Eurocentric, even colonizing mode in which Western aesthetics were still the unspoken standard for artistic assessment.
"What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" is an informal opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) to determine "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Eligible works were those written by an American author and published during the quarter-century period from 1980 through 2005. The poll was conducted by NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus, who sent letters to literary figures requesting their participation and received 124 responses. The results were published on May 21, 2006, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. An essay by A. O. Scott, titled "In Search of the Best", reflected on the results and the premise of the "Great American Novel".
Systems novel is a literary genre named by Tom LeClair in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, and explored further in LeClair's 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction LeClair used systems theory to critique novels by authors including Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Ursula Le Guin. Citing Fritjof Capra's description of systems theory as a "new vision of reality" LeClair invoked ideas from thinkers such as James Lovelock, Gregory Bateson and Douglas Hofstadter to analyse how the novels in question depicted processes and relationships within social, cultural, economic and political systems. LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect."
