Sentenced to death

Is a snooty "sentence cult" sending the Great American Novel to hell in a pretentious purple handbasket?

By Laura Miller

Aug. 16, 2001 | Literary critics get sluggish in the summer, when usually the most we're expected to do is come up with a list of "beach reads" and scan the fall catalogs. Slowly but surely, though, a response has materialized to B.J. Myers' long essay in the July/August 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, "A Reader's Manifesto," subtitled "An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose."

In brief, Myers asserts that the kind of fiction that wins radiant reviews and literary prizes usually consists of writing that is "repetitive ... elementary in its syntax, and ... numbing in its overuse of wordplay." Furthermore, the people who write it are "contemptuous of the urge to tell an exciting story." Myers selects five authors -- E. Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and David Guterson -- who exemplify various reprehensible trends, and he picks apart passages from their books, finding grotesquely "purple" prose here, "flat, laborious wordiness" there, and affectation and self-regard everywhere.

Everybody seems to relish this sort of bomb-throwing, which is probably why an essay similar to "A Reader's Manifesto" appears every decade or so, usually in Harper's magazine, though the Atlantic Monthly, in its recent campaign to raise its literary profile (the same issue includes Brooke Allen's defense of chain bookstores, which has also provoked an outcry), now makes a bold step into its rival's territory. As with the most (in)famous example of the form -- Tom Wolfe's self-serving but nevertheless defensible 1989 call for more social reporting in fiction, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" -- Myers' "manifesto" (it's really more of a cranky lament) is a gauntlet thrown at the feet of literary critics everywhere: Defend your darlings if you can!

The essay has been cheered by the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley for calling out the "self-absorbed, mannered fiction" that plagues today's readers. And Myers has been reviled in the Los Angeles Times Book Review by Lee Siegel, something of a literary sacred cow-slayer himself, for his "phony populism" and arrogance in declaring (according to Siegel) that because "ordinary people" are "too stupid to read complicated prose" therefore "great literature" should not be "difficult."

Myers has issued the kind of challenge that invites the literati to indulge in two of their favorite sports. The first is a hunched-shouldered grousing about the worthless dilettantes passing themselves off as writers these days; the second is a sort of apotheosis of indignation, in which critics -- like those small animals who, by puffing themselves up with air or arranging their strangely marked wings, can make themselves appear to be much more imposing creatures -- fend off the outrageous assault on their heroes and expound on the sublime, monumental, exultant and yet also intimate and consoling nature of the supreme pinnacles of the literary art! (Siegel, to be fair, manages to score a point or two, despite the fact that you can't really bring the phrase "great literature" into play without sounding like a bit of an ass.)

To anyone who hasn't read the original essay, these and other responses probably present a confusing impression of Myers' argument. Some commentators, like Siegel, insist that the essay is a demand that literary prose be "easy" to read; others describe it as a complaint about the decline of plot. Actually, it's about both (although Myers objects to the "easy" characterization), and as a result it skitters back and forth between a genuine grievance and the kind of pointless squabbling into which all "who is a Great Writer" conversations ultimately devolve. Myers will pick up a scrap of offending prose and wrinkle his nose at it, pointing out what he decrees to be nonsensical metaphors, adjectival excess and vapid repetitions masquerading as high literary style. Everyone who wound up hating these novels after being ordered by a teacher, cajoled by a book club or convinced by an adulatory friend to read them will predictably chortle with glee.

Because McCarthy and particularly DeLillo are holy totems for many critics, they've enjoyed the most heated defense from Myers' detractors, but what all this nitpicking really reveals is how slippery the notion of excellent prose is. Though I've never read her books, I don't, for example, consider Proulx's phrase "strangled, work-driven ways" to be as outrageously "incomprehensible" as Myers does. I have occasionally found McCarthy to be kitschy, it's true, but when it comes to style, I couldn't disagree more about DeLillo -- who has written glorious, unforgettable literary riffs, even if his weakness at story and character usually makes his books disappointing. On the basis of the excerpts included, David Guterson's writing does seem murky and solemn, but isn't he a bit of a has-been, anyway?

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