“I am throwing away my red pen,” Peck claims in his introduction, vowing to write no more hatchet jobs. That's a shame: his...
Twelve essays by the bad boy of contemporary book reviewing reveal a passionate, committed commentator who definitely has an axe to grind.
So what? Like any truly interesting critic, Peck has a coherent, openly stated aesthetic position that informs everything he writes, including his novels (Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye, 1998, etc.). “It all went wrong with Joyce,” he believes: modernism's rejection of traditional character and narrative development was a ghastly mistake, and if he grudgingly concedes its (possible) historical necessity, he sees little but empty posing in the work of such successors as Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo, pretentious windiness in the attempts of younger writers like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Lethem to employ modernist strategies yet still fulfill the novel's historic role as a mirror of and comment on society. Peck particularly dislikes Franzen, slapping him down in asides but never providing a full-length analysis that would explain this antipathy. Rick Moody and Sven Birkerts, subjects of the collection's most notorious demolition jobs, probably wish they'd been so lucky. You may never again read Birkerts' pompous prose with a straight face after finishing Peck's dismemberment of it, though you may also wonder if it merits such savagery. Peck argues that it does because Birkerts represents “the lowest common denominator of the American critical establishment” that is his real target, along with almost every prominent author of the past 50 years. (It seems almost deliberately perverse that he writes affectionately about Kurt Vonnegut.) Michael Cunningham is the only mainstream novelist who receives Peck's approval here; the single other favorable piece is devoted to Rebecca Brown, not exactly a household name. Peck's sustained, often brutal dissections of Phillip Roth, Julian Barnes, and David Foster Wallace, among others, can seem pedantic and unfair, but they amply make the point that there's way too much lazy prose and sloppy thinking in modern literature.
“I am throwing away my red pen,” Peck claims in his introduction, vowing to write no more hatchet jobs. That's a shame: his partisan, nastily persuasive naysaying adds a valuable perspective to our cultural debates.Pub Date: June 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-56584-874-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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