Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody’s memoir “The Black Veil”; calling the book “lies” and “criminal,” and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as “heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is ‘Ulysses’; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov … the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis … wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s … and the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.”

“Hatchet Jobs,” a forthcoming collection of Peck’s critical flayings-cum-manifesto, will be Peck’s parting shot. He’s quitting reviewing in part because he hasn’t gotten the response he hoped for. After years of reviews just as withering, the Moody piece for some reason inspired a burst of articles in places like Salon, the Believer and the New York Times. The writers of the “think” pieces for the most part passed up the opportunity to debate the canon or the state of the art, poking instead at nonburning side questions like whether harsh reviewing is nice, or fair, or civil, or appropriate, or hurtful — or just good fun.

“They just quote the zingers,” Peck complains. “I’m quitting because there’s no point; I’ve become this class clown, the guy who hates everything.” In the thumb-suckers’ defense, it’s not always easy to pry Peck’s diagnosis of literature’s ills from the rhetorical flail of his essays — he conflates conventional apples like Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides with unreadable oranges like William Gaddis and John Barth; he embraces, denounces and mischaracterizes modernism and postmodernism; he cops out in the afterword to “Hatchet Jobs” with unelaborated pronouncements like “the heart of the novel … is a diffuse locus of ideas and ideologies loosely tethered to a set of individual visions and personalities” and “literature is an act of revenge that aspires to elegy.”

But he’s right to lament a certain chilly remove in much serious contemporary literature, and in our interview, he succinctly names the problem as “books that point to other books rather than real life.” Literature has gotten insular; the brilliant literary tool of irony has been dulled to a nihilistic-yet-wimpy “whatever”; and too few books, as Peck puts it, “work toward a goal of rendering the truth of human experience rather than the truth of aesthetic expression.” He may even be right that a rude and aggressive gay man who grew up in a trailer home gets shut out of “a publishing context that’s quicker to embrace [Franzen, Eggers, Wallace, Moody et al.] than it is to embrace me because their message is more palatable.”

His strategy of denouncing the competition and the system, however, may backfire onto “What We Lost.” Not only has he alienated potential blurbers and reviewers in the cozy literary world; worse, he’s misrepresenting himself as a writer. The quality of his fiction is a pleasurable shock if all one’s read is his criticism. Moving, as I did, from the confused and nasty reviews (which he writes on a computer) to the clear, taut novels (composed in longhand) is like leaving a clanging boardwalk arcade for the roar and whisper of waves on sand. Peck’s fiction writing is visceral, risky yet controlled, lyrical and — especially in “What We Lost” — enormously compassionate.

Peck and I spoke in his East Village apartment on a rainy afternoon in November. It was the day “What We Lost” was being released, and he was understandably nervous about revenge-by-review. As it turned out, Andrew O’Hagan’s Nov. 16 review in the New York Times Book Review did stink of chickens coming home to roost. O’Hagan bizarrely asserted that “When gay men write about fatherhood, they are often ruminating about manhood,” because they won’t have children themselves, and then added that “it is not a book about his father’s farming episode [the book's ostensible subject] at all, but a rather oblique account of Dale Peck’s grapplings with the notion of male authority.” Unsupported by anything in the text or even Peck’s readily available biographical info (the subtext is certainly Peck’s own childhood, not that of his unborn sons), O’Hagan’s was not so much a hatchet job as a self-directed hand job. It was as if Peck hadn’t written a book: He’s gay, so his subject must be childlessness.

To write “What We Lost,” Peck interviewed his formerly violent, alcoholic father, Dale Peck Sr., about the older man’s childhood, which was even worse than the childhood he in turn inflicted on his own children. “What We Lost” is a generously embellished account of a year-and-a-half-long reprieve Peck Sr. had from the one-room house on Long Island he shared with seven siblings in two beds, along with a father who passed out in his own piss almost every night and a mother who hated her third son with a terrifying focus. She regularly beat him with a hose, kept food from him and, when a younger son was killed in an accident, told Dale, “It should have been you.”

One morning in 1956, Peck Sr.’s already-drunk father dropped off “the boy,” as he’s called in “What We Lost,” at the dairy farm of an uncle he’d never met. He worked the farm with his uncle and started running track at school, missing his brothers and sisters but enjoying the freedom from his mother’s Olympian spite and his father’s degradation. The boy is just unclenching, starting to trust in order, responsibility and the kindness of his aunt and uncle, when he’s abruptly returned to the chaos back home. There’s a harrowing scene of the boy and his big brother stalking the drunk “old man” through the pine barrens to lift his paycheck for the family. The story then leaps to 2001 and the trip Dale Sr., 10 years sober, and his 34-year-old son Dale Jr. make to the dairy farm.

What’s left out is the years in between. They’ve been covered before: Episodes of drunken cruelty bob to the surface of Peck’s three novels like a corpse carried down a river. Fifty pages of autobiography explode from the middle of his second novel, “The Law of Enclosures” (1996), where Peck repeats his suspicion, also hinted at in his debut, “Martin and John,” that his father struck the blow that ultimately killed his mother. Peck Jr. was almost 4 when she died, and three stepmothers followed in quick succession. Peck Sr. brutalized all of them, with the second getting it the worst. His father once dragged Dale Jr. and his sister Dalene out of bed to make them watch him put a gun to his third wife’s head and then to his own, before finally passing out. In that household, as Peck writes in “Enclosures,” “everything flew … her body, eight and a half months pregnant, over a chair — that was the morning she gave birth to her son — and her son’s body, across the dozen feet of the room we shared.”

The new book, with its tender portrait of the 13-year-old Dale, strikes me as a Jesus-caliber act of forgiveness. Peck says, “It may have taken my father 60 years to fix himself, and it’s ongoing, but I think he did. That’s what made me want to write ‘What We Lost,’ an acknowledgment of his ability to be true to his nature, which is a loving nature … In my fiction, there’s a divided aspect. I have to write the book where I go after my father’s jugular ['The Law of Enclosures'] and then I have to write the book where I lionize him. It’s very hard to put those two things together.”

Peck says he had a head start on the interviews he conducted with his father for “What We Lost” because “I knew a lot of this stuff from growing up.” He’s already told me that his father, a plumber, is “not a therapy type,” so I ask about the context of those first tellings.

What happens next on Peck’s living room couch is an eerie channeling. Peck grabs his empty coffee cup off the table and throws his head back and sucks at it. He slams the cup down and pokes his finger into my leg so hard it hurts for 10 minutes. His eyes narrow and he yells in an angry slur, “‘You fink you got it bad? I had it bad. My muvver used to beat me wif a rub-ber hose!’ That was the context,” Peck continues, his voice staying loud and furious. “Over and over again. ‘I’m going to get drunk and tell you why I’m such a bad father.’”

Peck says he and his sister were only badly beaten themselves once each, Peck for a “faggy haircut,” but they saw their stepmothers beaten whenever their father drank. Peck conjectures that “my father’s violence was as much a correction by example as it was punishing his mother — keeping your woman in line. If his own father had kept his mother in line, she’d never have done those things to him. My father was never as incensed with my stepmothers as when they disciplined me.”

Peck says, his voice back to chatty, “All that chaos had a very progenitive effect; it’s like atomic energy. It made me a writer. I’m not that creative, I’m analytic, not in a logical way, but I’m always trying to put together extremes, to see what they generate. I don’t think I would have had the temperament or desire to turn real things into fake things if I hadn’t had such a complex set of things to reconcile.”

That reconciliation has produced layers of complexity in Peck’s fiction, but it may have clouded his judgment as a critic. It’s funny and touching how disappointed he is that his reviews didn’t spur more literary discourse: Part of him meant those outrageous, often cruel attacks as tough, and toughening, love. “I think I read more closely than 90 percent of the critics working,” he says wistfully. Later, he adds, “Jeffrey Eugenides was the only one who responded to anything I said.”

He calls his critical method “aggressive misreadings” à la Harold Bloom. “That’s how Bloom says literature grows,” he explains. “The anxiety of influence produces misreadings which in turn leads to this desire for differentiation that produces new kinds of literature.” I’m not sure if this is how Bloom meant it, but Peck’s suggestion, from his review of “Infinite Jest,” that David Foster Wallace “shut off his goddamn word processor and try to find someone who would passionately shove a dick up his ass” certainly qualifies as aggressive, and is not a reading that ever occurred to me, even when I was most annoyed by Wallace’s infinite footnotes.

Another reason Peck expected more literary back-and-forth is that he takes criticism of his own novels very seriously, adjusting when he agrees with a review. His first novel, “Martin and John,” came out in 1993 and was widely hailed for its “beauty,” “wisdom,” and “mastery of literary form … that belies [Peck's] 25 years.” Edmund White called it “the best book of the year,” and Michael Cunningham declared the “launch of an important career.” The book is a succession of linked stories told about Martin by John, who grows up on a farm with an alcoholic father, Henry, and battered mother, Bea, before moving to New York.

Young Peck focused not on the praise, however, but on the censure, and accordingly reshaped his second novel, which he already knew he wanted to be about a “long, unhappy marriage.” “‘Law of Enclosures’ was responding to my critics, who said the marriage in ‘Martin and John’ was very black and white,” Peck says. “The reviews said the father was this demon and the mother was this victim … The marriage hadn’t gotten the full complex treatment it deserved. I said, ‘They’re right,’ and I tried to rectify it” in his second novel, which also featured Henry and Bea.

When I ask why he’s so anxious that his possibly murdered mother not come off like a victim, Peck says, “I think one of the way we perpetuate our hurts is by not looking at the context in which they were produced. One reason my father was so violent is that he could only see how he was wronged and he was going to make other people see that, even if he had to hurt them to do it. When you put things in a larger perspective, you see that the things that happened to you happened in a bigger context.”

This echoes what Peck says about postmodernism, which he embraces despite his loathing of postmodern fiction writers like Barth, Gaddis and Pynchon. “The incredibly difficult but I think profound gift of postmodernism is that there’s no aspect of human knowledge or existence that can ever be fixed, except that phenomenologically we know we exist,” he says. “What postmodernism taught us to do — and that’s why I love Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel ‘Everything Is Illuminated’ so much — is to locate ourselves in context, not how the realists did or how the modernists did with their stream of consciousness. Rather than looking inward and trying to find out who I am, which is impossible, because we can’t see ourselves without prisms of language and culture, you can set up points of reference, maybe through refraction. But your points will constantly change and you have to, too, and that’s very real.”

I can’t help it; I go all Oprah on his ass. Perhaps, I venture, he learned about changing reference points earlier than most people, from a series of mothers and from a father who became someone else when he drank and from the early entwining of love, hate and fear.

Peck replies breezily, “Love and hate and fear are equally intertwined for all people, but I’m very fortunate because I have very vivid stories to dramatize that.” He says later, “I write my books in a series, and I’m placing the character of John in greater and greater contexts,” he says, perhaps to get to “something more positive.” This really is a man writing, as the cliché has it, for his life: Domestic violence is a gift and postmodernism is the religion through which he interprets it.

Late in the afternoon, Peck is raging, not for the first time, about Joyce and DeLillo’s bad, aesthetics-over-experience “message,” and I ask him, “OK, so what’s your message?” He’s tired by now from my badgering and the rain and the worry about how “What We Lost” will be received. He sighs. “When you talk about fiction themes you’re reduced to statements that are trite or simplistic but true, and my fiction’s message is, ‘We are all suffering and in our suffering we seem to like to make others suffer too and maybe there’s a way around that.’

“What’s my message?” The hatchet man shrugs. “‘Can’t we all be nicer to each other?’ But how do you make that true and believable?”

And for campaign spokesman, please consider James Frey, the rising author who has, in effect, done the thing he swore never to do: He has traded in one addiction for another. That is, he has written a ballsy, bone-deep memoir about coming off drugs — titled “A Million Little Pieces” — which he is now promoting with such hopped-up, synthetically fueled mania that reading his interviews becomes a form of retox.

“A Million Little Pieces” has all the hallmarks of a Publishing Event. An eye-grabbing cover: the Buñuellian image of a human hand sheathed in micro-pills. A movie-ready subject: the near-death spiral and phoenixlike rebirth of a rich suburban kid. (Boy, Interrupted.) A string of high-profile blurbers: Pat Conroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Gus Van Sant. And, most telling of all, a publicity Anschluss, engineered by Random House’s genteel Nan Talese imprint.

The big noise began with a now-famous New York Observer interview, two full months before the book’s release, in which the 33-year-old Frey wasted no time sawing off the legs of his rivals. “I don’t give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name does or what David Foster Wallace does. I don’t give a fuck what any of those people do. I don’t hang out with them, I’m not friends with them, I’m not part of the literati.” Don’t even get him started on Dave Eggers. “A book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody who says that. I don’t give a fuck what they think about me. I’m going to try to write the best book of my generation and I’m going to try to be the best writer.”

And that was just appetizers. Before he was done, Frey had revealed:

According to Bruni, the candidate “readily shared his reading list with reporters,” and even exchanged books with him. Bush was clearly trying to send a message: I’m not as dumb as you think.

One year into office — and one image-transforming world crisis later — Bush is still using books to send a message. Only now he’s wielding them like a cudgel. Take the way he conspicuously flashed a copy of Bernie Goldberg’s media-bashing bestseller “Bias” to reporters as he made his way toward Marine One not long ago.

It was so bold, so decisive, so post-9/11 — the literary equivalent of giving the press the middle finger. Remember when he used to give those guys cute nicknames and slap them on the back? Not anymore.

Shortly after Sept. 11, the president made a point of toting around Jay Winik’s “April 1865: The Month That Saved America.” ‘Nuff said. Message received.

Of course, the president has always appeared to be of two minds about reading. On one side of the library sits the snickering C student from Yale, who, shortly before taking office, proudly boasted, “There’s book wisdom and there’s practical wisdom” — leaving no doubt about which kind he preferred. This is the anti-elite, anti-effete W. who once said of Yale and his fellow Yalie Bill Buckley: “He wrote a book there. I read one.”

On the other side of the library is the fellow we meet in Bruni’s book, trying way too hard to overcome his reputation as an intellectual lightweight. This is the one who has his press reps let us know any time he finishes reading some high-minded bestseller. This summer it was David McCullough’s biography of John Adams; at Christmas it was Edmund Morris’ “Theodore Rex.” It’s as though he’s expecting a smiley face at the top of his homework.

But even with all the childish preening, I still prefer Bush the bookworm. And apparently so do most Americans, suckers that we are for self-improvers and autodidacts. In a country burdened with shameful literacy rates, I like having a president who uses books as weapons. In fact, I’d like to see him take it a step further and borrow a page from that other Most Famous Person in the World, Oprah Winfrey, and start his own book club.

Ever since she turned the book world on its ear with her wildly successful reading revolution, publishers have been trying to re-create what they call the Oprah Effect. When she anoints a book, its sales go through the roof. Her picks have been responsible for creating 28 consecutive bestsellers and prompted the sale of more than 20 million books. No one has been able to match Oprah’s power or platform.

That’s where Bush comes in. Once a month the 43rd president of the United States could invite four or five average Americans to join him in the White House dining room for a bite and a televised discussion with the author of some new book the first lady or Karl Rove has taken a shine to.

Let’s see Jonathan Franzen try to snub the book clubber in chief.

For those of you worried there won’t be enough room in Bookville USA for both clubs, I’ve got a feeling that W. won’t be picking the same kind of introspective, soul-searching works that Oprah prefers. He is, after all, a guy who, when asked how Sept. 11 had changed him, responded: “I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. Except when I comb my hair.”

In other words, goodbye Toni Morrison, “The Deep End of the Ocean” and female protagonists done wrong by abusive men. Hello, Tom Clancy, “Black Hawk Down” and plainspoken macho men wielding big sticks. Picture a testosterone-fueled Y chromosome alternative to Oprah’s X-skewing incarnation — with a few deep tomes thrown in, perhaps chosen by the heavyweight X in the Cabinet, Condoleezza Rice.

Why ever not? Well, in the case of a certain boxer named Balboa, Stallone blames himself and the superstinkiness of the last “Rocky” flick.

“I made a big mistake with ‘Rocky 5,’” he confesses. “I should never have done it … There was nothing inspirational.”

Still, he says, he’d “love one more shot at getting that right, even though people will say I’m a little old for it.”

(Or a lotta old … )

And as for “Rambo,” Stallone has had to admit that his Rambo-kicks-Afghan-ass concept might be a little over-the-top.

“It would have been too much to have Rambo go in and kill Osama bin Laden, I suppose,” he tells the tab. “It would be an insult to every military guy. This time I don’t see Rambo going it alone.”

Adrienne! Adrienne!

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Like, a virgin? She ain’t sayin’ anymore

“I wished I had never said anything about it.”

– Britney Spears on whole proud-to-be-a-virgin thing, in the U.K. Sun.

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Clearing up the Dench stench

There is nothing like a dame disser. But Minnie Driver says her comments about Judi Dench’s looks were completely misconstrued.

“I never, I never called Dame Judi ‘small, round and middle-aged,’” Driver announced on a London TV news show. “What I was talking about was the notion of the way in which one looks, especially in Hollywood, as actresses get older the parts dry up. They just do. It’s a fact of life.

“And the way that someone like Dame Judi has continued to work and has continued to do astonishing roles.”

What she meant was that in the U.K., they really don’t much care what you look like. “It was always whether you were the best person for the job,” she said. “Your talent was what came first.”

At least until you’re “small, round and middle-aged.”

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Franzen goes Hollywood

Oprah may have denied him his turn on the small screen, but it looks like Jonathan Franzen may be having the last laugh after all.

His National Book Award-winning novel, “The Corrections,” is bound for the big screen. According to Variety, “The Corrections” is being adapted by playwright/screenwriter David Hare, the man behind “Plenty” and “Damage,” and will be directed by Stephen Daldry, of “Billy Elliot” fame. Filming will begin this winter.

Correct that, Oprah.

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Juicy bits

So much for that amicable parting. Mariah Carey’s lawyers have announced that they are considering taking legal action against Virgin/EMI records after the company used the word “terminated” instead of “canceled” when it announced Carey’s … um … canceled contract. This word change, Carey’s legal advisors claim, is a “direct violation” of their agreement. Virgin/EMI’s lawyer, Bert Fields, says he thinks Carey’s contention that the use of the word “terminated” implies that she was “unilaterally dumped” by her record company is unfounded. Implication: unilaterally silly.

Rumor has it someone new — and politically connected — will be there for you on an upcoming episode of “Friends”: Lauren Bush, the president’s 17-year-old fashion-model niece, has been given a walk-on part in the sitcom in which she glares at a few of the male regulars. Alas, she has no lines — maybe they were afraid she’d inherited her uncle’s talent with the spoken word.

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

Franzen has apologized and clarified, blamed his own inexperience in handling the media and attributed his reservations to not wanting to see a “corporate logo” on the cover of his book — but it will be difficult for him to erase the impression that snobbishness caused him to diss Winfrey. And so, alas. Alas because “The Corrections” is a very fine book, one of the best I’ve read in several years, and Franzen is a well-intentioned, hardworking, serious and very talented writer whose work I’ve long admired (full disclosure: I know Franzen socially). “Oprah Winfrey is bent on demonstrating that estimates of the size of the audience for good books is too small,” Franzen told the New York Times Wednesday, “and that is why it is so unfortunate that this is being cast as arrogant Franzen and popular Winfrey.”

Fixing that bit of typecasting will be as hard as any of the “corrections” attempted by Franzen’s characters, partly because there are so many people who are primed to believe the worst of him. His lapse hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. America’s book culture too often seems composed of two resentful camps, hunkered down in their foxholes, lobbing the occasional grenade at each other and nursing their grievances. One side sees itself as scorned by a snooty self-styled elite and the other sees itself as keepers of the literary flame, neglected by a vulgarian mainstream that would rather wallow in mediocrity and dreck. Each side remains exquisitely sensitive to perceived rejection from the other, and the fact that one is often characterized as female and the other as male resonates with the edgy relations between the sexes of late.

This divide in the reading public is also a place where the submerged class anxieties of American life flare up. Conversations about books are often rife with silly agendas, each speaker intent on indicating just how high (or, in the case of contrarians, low) his or her brow can go. It’s astonishing sometimes how dismissive and venomous readers can be when talking about authors they don’t like, or think they don’t like. Even if you do loathe the novels of, say, William Gass or Anne Tyler, unless you’re a student you can hardly claim with any credibility that they’re being thrust down your throat. Such nastiness is stupid and pointless. Film buffs got over this stuff years ago; thanks to critics like Pauline Kael, it’s possible to like Bergman without having to badmouth the Farrelly brothers. In fact, it’s entirely possible to enjoy both.

Furthermore, when a particular novel, like “The Corrections,” comes out to almost universally positive reviews (the New Republic — which pursues a formulaic policy of waiting to see which novels everyone else likes so that it can run an essay about how all other critics are sadly misguided dupes — doesn’t count), it and its author are regarded with not just suspicion but a kind of reflexive antipathy. Everyone’s had the experience of disliking a book — or a movie, or a record — that some critic raved about; that’s not what I mean. The more enthusiastic reviews a novel gets, the less convinced certain book people are that it has any merit.

You hear complaints about “hype,” despite the fact that no mere novel (with the possible exception of “Hannibal”) gets the kind of publicity and advertising accorded the average Hollywood movie (like, say, “Bandits”). This very invisibility is something, incidentally, that literary people always grouse about. A week after “The Corrections” debuted, a friend who works in publishing and admires the book explained, “People are sick of hearing about Franzen and will just be glad to read about something else for a change.” Would those be the same people who perpetually bemoan the fact that American culture doesn’t give enough weight and attention to novels? No doubt a goodly portion of the people who carped about the enthusiastic press for “The Corrections” will jump at the chance to knock Franzen for not wanting to seem too popular.

The sad and petty truth is that far too many book lovers don’t really want a good book to reach a large audience because that would tarnish the aura of specialness they enjoy as connoisseurs of literary merit. I’m not just talking about egghead critics here, since there are just as many people who stand ready to condemn “hip and trendy” or “too clever” books they’ve never taken the trouble to read. Behind what a friend calls the “get him! syndrome” — that reflexive impulse to take pot shots at any author enjoying “too much” attention — lies the deeply unattractive tendency for book people to act like stingy trolls sitting atop a mound of treasure they don’t want to share. If they did, it would be a lot harder to use their reading habits as a way of feeling better than other people.

What makes Franzen’s gaffe so unfortunate is that “The Corrections” is the kind of book that bridges the gap between high- and middlebrow readers, between people who like brainiac puzzle novels and those who want stories of family and emotional life. Enid Lambert, the mother character in the novel, is the book’s great achievement, a portrait of a sentimental Middle American woman that’s smart and unflinching but ultimately sympathetic. Oprah trusted that the readers she sent to “The Corrections” would connect with that sympathy and at the same time be able to handle Franzen’s sometimes savage take on contemporary life.

Franzen, by contrast, told Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” that he worried because some people at book signings (men, to be specific) had told him that they are “put off” by “Oprah books.” I can’t blame anyone who’s heard the kind of withering jibes sometimes directed at “Oprah books” for wincing at the idea that his book might be subjected to the same. (Here’s a suggestion: Only people who have never made such cracks are allowed to fulminate about Franzen’s blunder.) But the truth is that you can’t transcend the literary caste system while trying to cater discreetly to one faction.

Oprah’s selection of “The Corrections” was a bold, generous choice for a book that is also bold and generous. If the author has on this occasion lacked the nerve and imagination of his creation, well, writers are human beings, too, and sometimes they screw up. The books are what matter, if we could just manage to remember that.