How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (22 page)

Given the dourness of Peck's fiction, the humor comes as a welcome surprise. He likes to open his pieces with an outrageous statement guaranteed to grab your attention—“the worst writer of his generation” (Moody), “in a word, terrible” (David Foster Wallace's
Infinite Jest
), “it is so bad that I began to suspect he might actually have talent” ( Jim Crace's
The Devil's Larder
)—and, having done so, rewards you with a stream of zippy bons mots for the rest of the essay. During much of the time I was reading
Hatchet Jobs
, I was laughing out loud. The wit is rarely gratuitous, providing as it does a vivid (if often nasty) sense of what it feels like to read this or that author:

Only occasionally does the humor fall flat: “With friends like this, literature needs an enema. Ooh, that was probably a bit much, huh?” (Well, yes.) There is, too, a rangy imaginativeness to Peck's critical prose that allows him to illustrate the points he wants to make far more vividly than most critics can. For instance, he very astutely describes the main character in
The Intuitionist
, Colson Whitehead's debut novel, as “weirdly emotionless, simultaneously three-dimensional but without substance, like a figure half materialized on the transporter deck of the Enterprise.”

The humor and stylishness would be worth little without intelligence and acuity, and of each Peck has a great deal.
Hatchet Jobs
has much of interest to say about both individual authors and certain fashionable trends. (“Let's face it, cancer has become, in narrative terms, less a fatal disease than a gift, a learning experience, a personal triumph.”) He gets the feel of Kurt Vonnegut's cult-figure popularity just right (“Writers who are merely great—writers such as Mailer and Bellow and Roth and Updike—write stories which become part of our dreams, but cult writers are themselves dreamed about”). The famous takedown of Rick Moody's narrative self-indulgences is as deadly accurate as it is amusing. “Moody,” he writes,

This is not only vivid, but true.

I respect Peck's intelligence and talent too much to reduce him to a “gay writer,” but
Hatchet Jobs
offers every evidence that what you might call an “outsider” sensibility has informed his reading of certain authors, even those he considers to be “great” (as, for instance, he does Philip Roth). The results are often both stimulating and searching. Peck liked Roth's
American Pastoral
a good deal less than I did—as often, he can't seem to see anything positive in books in which he's found anything negative—but it's hard to deny the brilliance of the critique that he offers, in his essay “The Lay of the Land,” of the misogynistic current in
Roth's fiction. He achieves this critique, in part, by ingeniously teasing out the implications of Roth's title, noting that the earliest American writing consisted of settlers' “pastoral” descriptions of the virgin land. Then he goes on to observe that

It's a stark point that comes across all the more powerfully for lacking any whiff of special pleading.

That Peck's criticism is blissfully free of political (or politically correct) agendas is just as evident, and even more striking, in “Stop Thinking: The (D)evolution of Gay Literature.” This essay contains what is, to my mind, the single best critique of the curiously flat quality of much of the “gay-niche” fiction that has appeared in recent years. “A novel which aspires to social criticism,” Peck observes of Ethan Mordden's
How Long Has This Been Going On?
,

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:

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:

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: