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Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction
Since the initial publication of Hatchet Jobs , the groves of literary criticism have echoed with the clatter of steel on wood. From heated panels at Book Expo in Chicago to contretemps at writers' watering holes in New York, voices―even fists―have been raised. Peck's bracing philippic proposes that contemporary literature is at a dead end. Novelists have forfeited a wider audience, succumbing to identity politicking and self-reflexive postmodernism. In the torrent of responses to this fulguration, opinions were not so much divided as cleaved in two with, for example, Carlin Romano contending that "Peck's judgments are worse than nasty―they are hysterical" and Benjamin Schwarz retorting that "in his meticulous attention to diction, his savage wit, his exact and rollicking prose and his disdain for pseudointellectual flatulence, Dale Peck is Mencken's heir." Hatchet Jobs includes swinging critiques of the work of, among others, Sven Birkerts, Julian Barnes, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Jim Crace, Stanley Crouch, and Rick Moody.
228 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2004
4 people are currently reading
127 people want to read
About the author
Dale Peck
41 books108 followersDale Peck (born 1967 on Long Island, New York) is an American novelist, critic, and columnist. His 2009 novel, Sprout, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Children's/Young Adult literature, and was a finalist for the Stonewall Book Award in the Children's and Young Adult Literature category.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
August 10, 2025
This is a companion piece to A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, taking swipe at modern writers and arguing that inn many cases their exalted status is undeserved. It is longer than Myers and tends to group writers as representative of a feted group rather than deal with them individually. As such there is little overlap although if you are Don DeLillo or Rick Moody you must be questioning your life choices right now.
Peck’s approach is more chatty, more humorous and while it can seem less scholarly, less intellectually rigorous and easier to read the insight and understanding of literature is no less than Myers and it is Peck’s skill to furnish his mental acuity with accessibility. It is worth reading even if you have very little interest in literature for the cutting comments he peppers the book with, the type you wish you yourself had the wit to make. His take-down of Birkerts My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time is stored in my memory just waiting to be used in the right situation,
“Birkets …isn’t re-viewing his life in MSBT, he’s reviewing it in much the same way he reviews fiction, telling his readers what thy can learn from the text of his life. This sort of pedagogy would be dull from just about anyone, but coming form someone who seems to have done a little bit less than the average man of his day…it was particularly boring.”
Like Myers he addresses some of the issues that plagued me working in a bookshop – one being if you have a separate gay fiction section you’re effectively cutting out a large swathe of the buying market. It’s not even a deliberate decision, I’ve never read Alan Hollinghurst largely because he has been put on the Gay section shelf and that is not somewhere I’d look. He takes issue with authors who try to deal with societal issues yet only populate their novels with gay characters. Gay fiction and literature that has gay protagonists are different beasts and yet there is a clamour to see them as the same. I could not help but think of my most hated book, A Little Life when he talks of the current trend for gay epics where the epicdom derives “Not from depth of thought but depth-of-book, measured not in pages but inches.” His critique of Like People in History articulates exactly why I hated Yanagihara’s work so much. Both books start with a depressing premise – child abuse or AIDS and shows a main character who suffers but is also so insufferable to everyone around them and both authors duck explaining why anyone is attracted to these emotional black holes. Both run through a series of gimmicks where the events become increasingly horrific and decreasingly believable. Again Peck casts a final killer blow when having revealed the final boss of gimmicks – that a main character, who just happens to be a repeat winner of Mr Gay America, is the offspring of two parents with Down syndrome,
” The threesome [the parents and the son’s lover] have an extended conversation on homosexuality, AIDS and the myth of Achilles and Patroclus, all conducted in a five-year-old’s English , which seems to be a sort of lowest-common-denominator approach to both narrative and morality. In a book already groaning with gimmicks…it backfires because the words and ideas Matt’s retarded parents use are no less sophisticated than those used anywhere else [in the book].”
Ouch!
Peck then moves on to the power of marketing to package bad books through grouping them as a literary movement. He takes to task three contemporary black women writers who all have ridden the tails of the movement and lack anything fresh or worthwhile. His discussion of Precious by Sapphire highlights how it is in many ways the same skeleton as the gay epics just with a different skin. Again the list of tribulations heaped upon Precious seems more like a shopping list and so loses impact.
”Precious is kicked out of school for her behaviour problems and because she can’t read (it’s not her fault, she’s got troubles, and besides, she’s dyslexic too); then finally she learns she’s HIV positive. Still these tragedies are somehow contextualised…by the fact that Precious is taught to read by a lesbian named Blue Rain. All told, Sapphire has written a slim piece of propaganda designed to deliver the novel message that father-daughter rape is a bad thing and literacy a good thing.”
Sapphire also falls into the trap of not knowing how to give voice to her character. She has her speaking in an uneducated , grammatically incorrect slang, yet we know she has educated herself. If she is writing it before education that’s false as she was illiterate and if she is writing it from a future place where she has educated herself why is she using the language of her past giving the book a false naivete.
This is the heart of Peck’s argument, that laziness has been rewarded not through talent but purely by fitting the current requirements in the identity politics market.
In case you think this book just serves to give a kicking to marginalised groups, Peck directs his steel toe-caps to the lauded old, white men of literature. He has no time for Julian Barnes describing a lot of his work as, “harmless drivel, but it doesn’t explain why Barnes’ writing crawls under your skin and itches like scabies.” and when he quotes sections like the following you have to concede the point even if it is harshly made,
”We are all, are we not, lost. Those who know it not are the more lost. Those who do know it are found, for they have grasped their full lostness.”
His issue with Jim Crace is very much like Myers problem with much of modern literature, that in lieu of anything profound to say on the big subjects the smallness of life, the insignificant is imbued with a depth that is undeserving and inappropriate.
My point is not that Crace’s new book is bad, but rather that in its exclusively banal view of life, death, sex and art in its solemn pseudominimalist belief that any trivial detail, earnestly presented, is filled with significance, and in its reference-librarian’s elevation of facts to totems, it is so bad that I began to suspect that he might actually have talent.”
Peck continues the mauling of Rick Moody where Myers left off.
“ …If I follow his reasoning, which can be difficult since it proceeds primarily by rhythm and evocation rather than logic, then this book is meant to tell us what that sin is. By the time I finished reading, I was convinced the book was the sin.
…To be an American, Moody writes in one of the few syntactically lucid sentences in the book (unfortunately its also the third to last)…
The conclusion arrived at is the same as Myers. That contemporary literary fiction is weak because, “ they write for one another rather than some more or less common reader. Their prose shares a showiness that speaks of solidarity and competition…falsely intellectual.”
Where did it all go wrong you may ask. Peck blames Joyce, citing Portrait of the Artist as the chapter by chapter unravelling of a talent and Ulysses as, “nothing more than a hoax upon literature, a joint shenanigan of the author and the critical establishment…” Having read neither I cannot offer an opinion other than to say I have never been interested in reading either because I think deep in my literary instinct I have long suspected it to be the case.
Peck is a brilliant critic, a deep understanding of literature and the ability to critique it in a persuasive and entertaining way. If you’ve been toying with whether to kill your literary darlings, save your energy, Peck has already got to them with his keen-edged axe.
Peck’s approach is more chatty, more humorous and while it can seem less scholarly, less intellectually rigorous and easier to read the insight and understanding of literature is no less than Myers and it is Peck’s skill to furnish his mental acuity with accessibility. It is worth reading even if you have very little interest in literature for the cutting comments he peppers the book with, the type you wish you yourself had the wit to make. His take-down of Birkerts My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time is stored in my memory just waiting to be used in the right situation,
“Birkets …isn’t re-viewing his life in MSBT, he’s reviewing it in much the same way he reviews fiction, telling his readers what thy can learn from the text of his life. This sort of pedagogy would be dull from just about anyone, but coming form someone who seems to have done a little bit less than the average man of his day…it was particularly boring.”
Like Myers he addresses some of the issues that plagued me working in a bookshop – one being if you have a separate gay fiction section you’re effectively cutting out a large swathe of the buying market. It’s not even a deliberate decision, I’ve never read Alan Hollinghurst largely because he has been put on the Gay section shelf and that is not somewhere I’d look. He takes issue with authors who try to deal with societal issues yet only populate their novels with gay characters. Gay fiction and literature that has gay protagonists are different beasts and yet there is a clamour to see them as the same. I could not help but think of my most hated book, A Little Life when he talks of the current trend for gay epics where the epicdom derives “Not from depth of thought but depth-of-book, measured not in pages but inches.” His critique of Like People in History articulates exactly why I hated Yanagihara’s work so much. Both books start with a depressing premise – child abuse or AIDS and shows a main character who suffers but is also so insufferable to everyone around them and both authors duck explaining why anyone is attracted to these emotional black holes. Both run through a series of gimmicks where the events become increasingly horrific and decreasingly believable. Again Peck casts a final killer blow when having revealed the final boss of gimmicks – that a main character, who just happens to be a repeat winner of Mr Gay America, is the offspring of two parents with Down syndrome,
” The threesome [the parents and the son’s lover] have an extended conversation on homosexuality, AIDS and the myth of Achilles and Patroclus, all conducted in a five-year-old’s English , which seems to be a sort of lowest-common-denominator approach to both narrative and morality. In a book already groaning with gimmicks…it backfires because the words and ideas Matt’s retarded parents use are no less sophisticated than those used anywhere else [in the book].”
Ouch!
Peck then moves on to the power of marketing to package bad books through grouping them as a literary movement. He takes to task three contemporary black women writers who all have ridden the tails of the movement and lack anything fresh or worthwhile. His discussion of Precious by Sapphire highlights how it is in many ways the same skeleton as the gay epics just with a different skin. Again the list of tribulations heaped upon Precious seems more like a shopping list and so loses impact.
”Precious is kicked out of school for her behaviour problems and because she can’t read (it’s not her fault, she’s got troubles, and besides, she’s dyslexic too); then finally she learns she’s HIV positive. Still these tragedies are somehow contextualised…by the fact that Precious is taught to read by a lesbian named Blue Rain. All told, Sapphire has written a slim piece of propaganda designed to deliver the novel message that father-daughter rape is a bad thing and literacy a good thing.”
Sapphire also falls into the trap of not knowing how to give voice to her character. She has her speaking in an uneducated , grammatically incorrect slang, yet we know she has educated herself. If she is writing it before education that’s false as she was illiterate and if she is writing it from a future place where she has educated herself why is she using the language of her past giving the book a false naivete.
This is the heart of Peck’s argument, that laziness has been rewarded not through talent but purely by fitting the current requirements in the identity politics market.
In case you think this book just serves to give a kicking to marginalised groups, Peck directs his steel toe-caps to the lauded old, white men of literature. He has no time for Julian Barnes describing a lot of his work as, “harmless drivel, but it doesn’t explain why Barnes’ writing crawls under your skin and itches like scabies.” and when he quotes sections like the following you have to concede the point even if it is harshly made,
”We are all, are we not, lost. Those who know it not are the more lost. Those who do know it are found, for they have grasped their full lostness.”
His issue with Jim Crace is very much like Myers problem with much of modern literature, that in lieu of anything profound to say on the big subjects the smallness of life, the insignificant is imbued with a depth that is undeserving and inappropriate.
My point is not that Crace’s new book is bad, but rather that in its exclusively banal view of life, death, sex and art in its solemn pseudominimalist belief that any trivial detail, earnestly presented, is filled with significance, and in its reference-librarian’s elevation of facts to totems, it is so bad that I began to suspect that he might actually have talent.”
Peck continues the mauling of Rick Moody where Myers left off.
“ …If I follow his reasoning, which can be difficult since it proceeds primarily by rhythm and evocation rather than logic, then this book is meant to tell us what that sin is. By the time I finished reading, I was convinced the book was the sin.
…To be an American, Moody writes in one of the few syntactically lucid sentences in the book (unfortunately its also the third to last)…
The conclusion arrived at is the same as Myers. That contemporary literary fiction is weak because, “ they write for one another rather than some more or less common reader. Their prose shares a showiness that speaks of solidarity and competition…falsely intellectual.”
Where did it all go wrong you may ask. Peck blames Joyce, citing Portrait of the Artist as the chapter by chapter unravelling of a talent and Ulysses as, “nothing more than a hoax upon literature, a joint shenanigan of the author and the critical establishment…” Having read neither I cannot offer an opinion other than to say I have never been interested in reading either because I think deep in my literary instinct I have long suspected it to be the case.
Peck is a brilliant critic, a deep understanding of literature and the ability to critique it in a persuasive and entertaining way. If you’ve been toying with whether to kill your literary darlings, save your energy, Peck has already got to them with his keen-edged axe.
May 18, 2012
MY FAIRLY DULL 30 DAY FACEBOOK CHALLENGE
So if I was "on Facebook" as they say, I'd have done this. You have to name a book in these 30 categories. Here goes
Day 1: Favorite book
Bad start - there's no such animal. But let's say Ulysses.
Day 2: Least favorite book
Oh, I know this one - American Psycho. But Topping from Below runs it close second.
Day 3: Book that makes you laugh out loud
The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley will do. Also Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh.
Day 4: Book that makes you cry
Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry
Day 5: Book you wish you could live in
The Fermata by Nicholson Baker but only if I could be the despicable Arno Strine.
Day 6: Favorite young adult book
Titus Groan
Day 7: Book that you can quote/recite
Both Incredible String Band songbooks and a bit of Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen). Also bits of the Bible.
Day 8: Book that scares you
American Psycho - it scares me that reasonably intelligent people can think that it's satire and that makes it okay
Day 9: Book that makes you sick
So many, so many, but let's go for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bit obvious I know. The Mad Man by Samuel Delaney was fairly trying too. Topping from below, of course - the dog scene was a classic.
Day 10: Book that changed your life
Something Wicked this way Comes by Ray Bradbury.
Day 11: Book from your favorite author
I suppose Rohinton Mistry is my current favourite author, so A Fine Balance.
Day 12: Book that is most like your life
In terms of job, and not having read it but read about it, Microserfs by Douglas Coupland.
Day 13: Book whose main character is most like you
The Bible Part Two (aka New testament) - Doubting Thomas
Day 14: Book whose main character you want to marry
The Crimson Petal and the White - Sugar - she's so nice - except she turns into a same sex oriented person eventually. So that would be like Ross in Friends. So perhaps not. Okay - I know - Kate from The Country Girls (Edna O'Brien) - she's hilarious and in my mind she's a knockout too.
Day 15: First “chapter book” you can remember reading as a child
Er - huh? Meaning not a picture book? I think it would be one of the many William books.
Day 16: Longest book you’ve read
The Quincunx.
Day 17: Shortest book you’ve read
What a silly question - the shortest book I currently have is Giving Up by Jillian Becker which is about the last week in the life of Sylvia Plath - 48 pages. Big print too.
Day 18: Book you’re most embarrassed to say you like
True crime , all the way! Hell Ranch!
Day 19: Book that turned you on
Sigh - do I have to answer this? - no? Okay, next -
Day 20: Book you’ve read the most number of times
The Circus of Dr Lao by Charles Finney
Day 21: Favorite picture book from childhood
None, I was very deprived
Day 22: Book you plan to read next
The Time of our Singing, maybe.
Day 23: Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished)
As if! What do you take me for!
Day 24: Book that contains your favorite scene
This is a stupid question - favourite scene? Well, I did think the involuntary Bobbitting of the boyfriend scene in The World According to Garp was extremely memorable.
Day 25: Favorite book you read in school
Can't remember.
Day 26: Favorite nonfiction book
The Earth from the Air.
Day 27: Favorite fiction book
Too many to mention.
Day 28: Last book you read
Topping from Below
Day 29: Book you’re currently reading
All Hell Let Loose
Day 30: Favorite coffee table book
Victorian Painting, Lionel Lambourne
**
Wow, that was kind of boring - I could think of better questions than those. Anyone care to do the PB Goodreads Instant Challenge?
What's the author you most recently wanted to kill?
What's your favourite book cover?
What's the ugliest book cover you've seen recently?
What's the most ridiculous place you've ever tried to read?
Who's the sexiest author?
Why do you despair at the state of the contemporary novel?
What would YOU have given the Booker to, since you say all the actual winners are such crap?
What's the last thing you found squashed between the pages of a book?
What's the last argument you had about a book?
What's your weirdest book story?
So if I was "on Facebook" as they say, I'd have done this. You have to name a book in these 30 categories. Here goes
Day 1: Favorite book
Bad start - there's no such animal. But let's say Ulysses.
Day 2: Least favorite book
Oh, I know this one - American Psycho. But Topping from Below runs it close second.
Day 3: Book that makes you laugh out loud
The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley will do. Also Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh.
Day 4: Book that makes you cry
Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry
Day 5: Book you wish you could live in
The Fermata by Nicholson Baker but only if I could be the despicable Arno Strine.
Day 6: Favorite young adult book
Titus Groan
Day 7: Book that you can quote/recite
Both Incredible String Band songbooks and a bit of Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen). Also bits of the Bible.
Day 8: Book that scares you
American Psycho - it scares me that reasonably intelligent people can think that it's satire and that makes it okay
Day 9: Book that makes you sick
So many, so many, but let's go for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bit obvious I know. The Mad Man by Samuel Delaney was fairly trying too. Topping from below, of course - the dog scene was a classic.
Day 10: Book that changed your life
Something Wicked this way Comes by Ray Bradbury.
Day 11: Book from your favorite author
I suppose Rohinton Mistry is my current favourite author, so A Fine Balance.
Day 12: Book that is most like your life
In terms of job, and not having read it but read about it, Microserfs by Douglas Coupland.
Day 13: Book whose main character is most like you
The Bible Part Two (aka New testament) - Doubting Thomas
Day 14: Book whose main character you want to marry
The Crimson Petal and the White - Sugar - she's so nice - except she turns into a same sex oriented person eventually. So that would be like Ross in Friends. So perhaps not. Okay - I know - Kate from The Country Girls (Edna O'Brien) - she's hilarious and in my mind she's a knockout too.
Day 15: First “chapter book” you can remember reading as a child
Er - huh? Meaning not a picture book? I think it would be one of the many William books.
Day 16: Longest book you’ve read
The Quincunx.
Day 17: Shortest book you’ve read
What a silly question - the shortest book I currently have is Giving Up by Jillian Becker which is about the last week in the life of Sylvia Plath - 48 pages. Big print too.
Day 18: Book you’re most embarrassed to say you like
True crime , all the way! Hell Ranch!
Day 19: Book that turned you on
Sigh - do I have to answer this? - no? Okay, next -
Day 20: Book you’ve read the most number of times
The Circus of Dr Lao by Charles Finney
Day 21: Favorite picture book from childhood
None, I was very deprived
Day 22: Book you plan to read next
The Time of our Singing, maybe.
Day 23: Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished)
As if! What do you take me for!
Day 24: Book that contains your favorite scene
This is a stupid question - favourite scene? Well, I did think the involuntary Bobbitting of the boyfriend scene in The World According to Garp was extremely memorable.
Day 25: Favorite book you read in school
Can't remember.
Day 26: Favorite nonfiction book
The Earth from the Air.
Day 27: Favorite fiction book
Too many to mention.
Day 28: Last book you read
Topping from Below
Day 29: Book you’re currently reading
All Hell Let Loose
Day 30: Favorite coffee table book
Victorian Painting, Lionel Lambourne
**
Wow, that was kind of boring - I could think of better questions than those. Anyone care to do the PB Goodreads Instant Challenge?
What's the author you most recently wanted to kill?
What's your favourite book cover?
What's the ugliest book cover you've seen recently?
What's the most ridiculous place you've ever tried to read?
Who's the sexiest author?
Why do you despair at the state of the contemporary novel?
What would YOU have given the Booker to, since you say all the actual winners are such crap?
What's the last thing you found squashed between the pages of a book?
What's the last argument you had about a book?
What's your weirdest book story?
November 4, 2013
Here we have Dale Peck doing the fish slapping dance with a few of his literary contemporaries, and I love it. They have to stand there rigid and appearing to be unconcerned while sprightly Dale hops around, derides them horribly, and slaps their chops with a large haddock. I would give this book 5 stars, but mostly, Dale is beating up on authors I haven't read and - now! - have no intention of reading, so it's mostly somebody else's (beautifully invectivised) argument. The authors here dissected, filleted and grossly insulted who I never read are :
Sven Birkerts
Colson Whitehead
Jamaica Kincaid
Terry McMillan
Jim Crace
Stanley Crouch
Rick Moody
and the ones I have read are
DFW
Kurt Vonnegut
Julian Barnes
Sapphire
Philip Roth
So I guess this is the hipster version of B R Myers' A Reader's Manifesto which denounced certain American literary authors for their pretensions and general wanky unreadability. Here's Dale speaking generally :
even taking into consideration the theory that cinematic and virtual media have displaced the printed word as the dominant narrative form and that the novel and its grown-too-big-for-its-britches sibling, the memoir, are only occasionally profitable anachronisms; even recognising that literary standards and technological advances have made it theoretically feasible for just about anyone to write and publish a book [Dale was writing in 2004] - even considering all these factors, the number of Stepford novels that are written, published, reviewed, and read every year is completely out of control. ....
Blame the writing programs and the prize committees, blame the deconstructionist literary critics or the back-patting Siamese-twinned professions of writing and reviewing fiction, blame any or all of the identity communities who read and write those ethnic-or-gender-marketed booster books or blame the dead white European males who forced us to resort to Literature as our Daily Affirmation in the first place.
And here's a flavour of his specific charges - first, against Stanley Crouch :
Crouch is neither virtuosic nor possessed of good marksmanship; he's just another demagogue in an age that confuses demagoguery with honesty; a black man who uses the veil of anti-pc polemic to make criticisms of black culture that white Americans are either too cowed or too smart to put forth themselves... suffice it to say that here is one black man calling other black men monkeys, denying blackness to those African Americans who fail to live up to his standards and conferring it on those who do. ... Don't the Moon Look Lonesome is a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed, and put forward in bad faith...
and now David Foster Wallace :
What makes Infinite Jest's success even more noteworthy is that it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous and - perhaps especially - uncontrolled. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase "not worth the paper it's printed on" has real meaning at least in an ecological sense; but to resort to such hyperbole would be to fall into the rut that characterizes many reviews of this novel... I resent the five weeks of my life I gave over to reading the thing; I resent every endlessly over-elaborated gag in the book, like a ten-page riff on why video telephones are unviable, or the dozen pages on the teenager who won all his tennis matches by playing with a pistol held to his head, or the thousands and thousands and thousands of words devoted to pharmaceutical trivia on all sorts of mind-altering drugs.... I could, a la Edward Said, accuseWallace of cultural colonialism in the peppering of his otherwise exclusively white male text with exoticized African-Americans, women, and homosexuals, and, further, I think the case can be made that the narrative technique Wallace has derived from Pynchon is nothing more than a watered-down de(homo)-eroticized style that lives on Sontag's "barren edge of Camp".
You may not agree with Dale, but I still recommed his book, because for some of us bookish types, it's the nearest thing to a bracing walk in a drench of freezing rain on a cliff path with crumbly edges and no guard rail.
Sven Birkerts
Colson Whitehead
Jamaica Kincaid
Terry McMillan
Jim Crace
Stanley Crouch
Rick Moody
and the ones I have read are
DFW
Kurt Vonnegut
Julian Barnes
Sapphire
Philip Roth
So I guess this is the hipster version of B R Myers' A Reader's Manifesto which denounced certain American literary authors for their pretensions and general wanky unreadability. Here's Dale speaking generally :
even taking into consideration the theory that cinematic and virtual media have displaced the printed word as the dominant narrative form and that the novel and its grown-too-big-for-its-britches sibling, the memoir, are only occasionally profitable anachronisms; even recognising that literary standards and technological advances have made it theoretically feasible for just about anyone to write and publish a book [Dale was writing in 2004] - even considering all these factors, the number of Stepford novels that are written, published, reviewed, and read every year is completely out of control. ....
Blame the writing programs and the prize committees, blame the deconstructionist literary critics or the back-patting Siamese-twinned professions of writing and reviewing fiction, blame any or all of the identity communities who read and write those ethnic-or-gender-marketed booster books or blame the dead white European males who forced us to resort to Literature as our Daily Affirmation in the first place.
And here's a flavour of his specific charges - first, against Stanley Crouch :
Crouch is neither virtuosic nor possessed of good marksmanship; he's just another demagogue in an age that confuses demagoguery with honesty; a black man who uses the veil of anti-pc polemic to make criticisms of black culture that white Americans are either too cowed or too smart to put forth themselves... suffice it to say that here is one black man calling other black men monkeys, denying blackness to those African Americans who fail to live up to his standards and conferring it on those who do. ... Don't the Moon Look Lonesome is a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed, and put forward in bad faith...
and now David Foster Wallace :
What makes Infinite Jest's success even more noteworthy is that it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous and - perhaps especially - uncontrolled. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase "not worth the paper it's printed on" has real meaning at least in an ecological sense; but to resort to such hyperbole would be to fall into the rut that characterizes many reviews of this novel... I resent the five weeks of my life I gave over to reading the thing; I resent every endlessly over-elaborated gag in the book, like a ten-page riff on why video telephones are unviable, or the dozen pages on the teenager who won all his tennis matches by playing with a pistol held to his head, or the thousands and thousands and thousands of words devoted to pharmaceutical trivia on all sorts of mind-altering drugs.... I could, a la Edward Said, accuseWallace of cultural colonialism in the peppering of his otherwise exclusively white male text with exoticized African-Americans, women, and homosexuals, and, further, I think the case can be made that the narrative technique Wallace has derived from Pynchon is nothing more than a watered-down de(homo)-eroticized style that lives on Sontag's "barren edge of Camp".
You may not agree with Dale, but I still recommed his book, because for some of us bookish types, it's the nearest thing to a bracing walk in a drench of freezing rain on a cliff path with crumbly edges and no guard rail.
August 21, 2007
A nasty, boring book in which someone whose talent appears to have sputtered out years previously, attempted to gain some notoriety by taking a hatchet to the work of others.
Sour grapes much, Dale? At least Jonathan Franzen has some talent to back up his obnoxious public persona. With this author there's all the obnoxiousness and very little talent.
Sour grapes much, Dale? At least Jonathan Franzen has some talent to back up his obnoxious public persona. With this author there's all the obnoxiousness and very little talent.
December 10, 2011
"It seems to me that there are two strains of literature currently in vogue - what I have referred to...as recherché postmodernism and recidivist realism - and both of them, in my opinion, suck," writes Dale Peck. "As one reads contemporary novelists, one can't shake the feeling that they write for one another rather than some more or less common reader. Their prose shares a showiness that speaks of solidarity and competition..." I certainly don't disagree with his conclusions that much of current fiction is highly undesirable, but B.R. Myers in A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose explained it better and more coherently.
February 22, 2011
Well, as my dad used to say, "If you can't say something mean and funny . . . then just say something mean." Dale Peck works that maxim all the way to the bitter end.
September 21, 2020
I read this years ago, probably in 2005.
It was so good. Probably I would give it a five, except for the one review which wasn't a hatchet job.
It was so good. Probably I would give it a five, except for the one review which wasn't a hatchet job.
July 14, 2025
At a New York literary event in 2005, Richard Ford, the American fiction aristocrat, stepped up to Colson Whitehead and spat on him. Whitehead, the author of two novels and an emerging African-American voice of some importance, had reviewed Ford's A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times, attributing to it failings in the nature of self-absorption, incompleteness and 'whining.' The incident, as reported in New York Magazine, was just part of a debate over book reviewing that's raging among the literati. Its value as a cultural performance is being questioned, as is its purported pirating by the so-called 'snark' school of reviewers.
Two years ago the novelist Heidi Julavits confessed in an interview that while reading reviews of her first book ‘… the tiniest little criticisms in it, and I would be completely under the table for three days.’ She thus set off on a crusade to make literary comment more sensitive, helping launch a new magazine, The Believer; so named, she infers, in the spirit of vanquishing the ‘unbelievers’. Writing in the debut issue Julavits minted the ‘snark’ label for that cadre of nattering nabobs of literary negativism and proclaimed a yearning for a literary culture that supports ‘ambition’. A number of darlings of the publishing world—Dave Eggars, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith among them—caught up in the notion of this odd immunity-from-literary-prosecution cult, have jumped aboard the seemingly irony-free anti-snark freedom train.
Though physical conflict in literary circles is no new thing—Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal haven’t sat close at a dinner party since the nineteen-sixties—the current strain of book-notice venom is felt by many to be more pernicious than ever. Even the snarkers are at each other: Dale Peck, in his splendid new book Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction, says of Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days: ‘…(the author’s) ambitions are so vast they seemed to have snowed readers into confusing intended with actual product.’ So far there is no word on Whitehead’s intentions for expectorate vengeance upon Dale Peck.
Is all this just a tempest in a Starbuck’s? Should fragile people be writers or vice versa? Should a negative review be a spittle-firing squad offence?
Hard to say, sensitivity being universally understood as essential to artistry. But oblivious to whatever damage might come to the egos of his targets or to his own reputation, over the past eight years or so Dale Peck has been leading the charge for what seems to me, having read a number of the authors under his mention, some kind of truth in reviewing. Though on record as being interested only in advancing the art of fiction, Peck here stands as a voice for the reading audience out there who expect a positively-reviewed book of literary fiction to at least be readable, if not entertaining in some way.
Hatchet Jobs configures seventeen of Peck’s most erudite reviews into a persuasive anti-pretension polemic. On the firing line are writers such as Rick Moody (…the worst writer of his generation); David Foster Wallace (…proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders); Jim Crace (…everything I despise about contemporary fiction.); and Julian Barnes (…crawls under your skin and itches like rabies).
Snark reviews might simply seem nasty to the average not-looking-for-trouble-reader out there, but Peck notes a distinct damping down of excitement in fiction over the past few years. Among other complaints, he notes an over-dependence upon family history to stand in for and sometimes interfere with actual storytelling (see comments re autobiography below), and the artless application of personal philosophy, sans conceit, thick onto the page. Peck cites Stanley Crouch’s Don’t The Moon Look Lonesome, and The Autobiography of My Mother, by Jamaica Kincaid, as particularly so afflicted.
But by the tenor of the mainstream reviews, Peck points out, these pat books might be works of genius. Thus it is not just authors he is after, but critics, who are—as in the past and even more in this age of vocational multitasking—often one and the same. He snorts: ‘…as over-rated and misguided as most of our celebrated novelists are, it seems to me that the fault isn’t entirely theirs, but must be vested to some degree in those who praise them for their efforts.’ Peck strives thus to deflate the puffery of the pretentious, the exclusion-ism of a literary-intellectual cult whose recent efforts have tended to partition general readership from the exalted personages of discernment (i.e. themselves). He sneers at the …pseudo-intellectual artists and critics who think their love of books translates into some kind of knowledge….Chances are they will alienate more and more readers from all fiction. In castigating the novelist/critic Sven Birkets, whose critical screeds Peck believes aspire vastly beyond the author’s capabilities, he lashes: …with friends like this, literature needs an enema.
When fiction is not the subject, Peck takes on those ‘veterans’ of one or two books, mainly writing program grads younger than fifty, with the temerity to be penning exhaustive, finely-facted autobiographies. Peck dismisses Birkets’ My Sky Blue Trades, thusly: …dull from just about anyone, but coming from someone who seems to have done a little bit less than the average man of his day…it was particularly boring.
Hatchet Jobs is written with a thoroughgoing aplomb and in a spirit of entertainment no doubt vastly more engaging than the works being discussed. As a novelist himself, Peck is obviously self-interested in promoting the purchase, reading and enjoyment of fiction. And amid the jabs, cuts and slams, it is clear by his extensive research that he fully expects to be examined himself. For every dull book he is paid to read, Peck force-marches himself through the author’s oeuvre, slapping himself alert over many hundreds of doze-inducing pages, just in case there might have been something worthwhile earlier on. He then discusses the work in near excessive detail; these reviews are journal pieces, usually published in places where books are the general subject. They run to quite un-newspaperly lengths, usually three thousands words, some far longer.
Though the book is full of biting reductions, Hatchet Jobs is not all nastiness. Almost touching is Peck’s consideration of the fallen career of Kurt Vonnegut; the cult-meister’s albatross-like curse of trying to follow himself; the emptiness of his later fiction.
This is a book written so well that it can be enjoyed even if you haven’t read any of the works addressed. If Dale Peck can be critically checked at all in this effort it would be in the choosing of his targets. By the sampling offered in Hatchet Jobs, it is clear he has given the up-and-comers most of his ink; eschewing, or perhaps simply not being assigned, terrific American writers like style-maker Cormac McCarthy, genre-breaker James Elroy, urban-cool master Don DeLillo, or first novelist Charles Frazier, whose Cold Mountain would have blown off Peck’s drowsiness in just a few sentences.
Two years ago the novelist Heidi Julavits confessed in an interview that while reading reviews of her first book ‘… the tiniest little criticisms in it, and I would be completely under the table for three days.’ She thus set off on a crusade to make literary comment more sensitive, helping launch a new magazine, The Believer; so named, she infers, in the spirit of vanquishing the ‘unbelievers’. Writing in the debut issue Julavits minted the ‘snark’ label for that cadre of nattering nabobs of literary negativism and proclaimed a yearning for a literary culture that supports ‘ambition’. A number of darlings of the publishing world—Dave Eggars, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith among them—caught up in the notion of this odd immunity-from-literary-prosecution cult, have jumped aboard the seemingly irony-free anti-snark freedom train.
Though physical conflict in literary circles is no new thing—Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal haven’t sat close at a dinner party since the nineteen-sixties—the current strain of book-notice venom is felt by many to be more pernicious than ever. Even the snarkers are at each other: Dale Peck, in his splendid new book Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction, says of Whitehead’s novel John Henry Days: ‘…(the author’s) ambitions are so vast they seemed to have snowed readers into confusing intended with actual product.’ So far there is no word on Whitehead’s intentions for expectorate vengeance upon Dale Peck.
Is all this just a tempest in a Starbuck’s? Should fragile people be writers or vice versa? Should a negative review be a spittle-firing squad offence?
Hard to say, sensitivity being universally understood as essential to artistry. But oblivious to whatever damage might come to the egos of his targets or to his own reputation, over the past eight years or so Dale Peck has been leading the charge for what seems to me, having read a number of the authors under his mention, some kind of truth in reviewing. Though on record as being interested only in advancing the art of fiction, Peck here stands as a voice for the reading audience out there who expect a positively-reviewed book of literary fiction to at least be readable, if not entertaining in some way.
Hatchet Jobs configures seventeen of Peck’s most erudite reviews into a persuasive anti-pretension polemic. On the firing line are writers such as Rick Moody (…the worst writer of his generation); David Foster Wallace (…proof that the Great American Hype Machine can still work wonders); Jim Crace (…everything I despise about contemporary fiction.); and Julian Barnes (…crawls under your skin and itches like rabies).
Snark reviews might simply seem nasty to the average not-looking-for-trouble-reader out there, but Peck notes a distinct damping down of excitement in fiction over the past few years. Among other complaints, he notes an over-dependence upon family history to stand in for and sometimes interfere with actual storytelling (see comments re autobiography below), and the artless application of personal philosophy, sans conceit, thick onto the page. Peck cites Stanley Crouch’s Don’t The Moon Look Lonesome, and The Autobiography of My Mother, by Jamaica Kincaid, as particularly so afflicted.
But by the tenor of the mainstream reviews, Peck points out, these pat books might be works of genius. Thus it is not just authors he is after, but critics, who are—as in the past and even more in this age of vocational multitasking—often one and the same. He snorts: ‘…as over-rated and misguided as most of our celebrated novelists are, it seems to me that the fault isn’t entirely theirs, but must be vested to some degree in those who praise them for their efforts.’ Peck strives thus to deflate the puffery of the pretentious, the exclusion-ism of a literary-intellectual cult whose recent efforts have tended to partition general readership from the exalted personages of discernment (i.e. themselves). He sneers at the …pseudo-intellectual artists and critics who think their love of books translates into some kind of knowledge….Chances are they will alienate more and more readers from all fiction. In castigating the novelist/critic Sven Birkets, whose critical screeds Peck believes aspire vastly beyond the author’s capabilities, he lashes: …with friends like this, literature needs an enema.
When fiction is not the subject, Peck takes on those ‘veterans’ of one or two books, mainly writing program grads younger than fifty, with the temerity to be penning exhaustive, finely-facted autobiographies. Peck dismisses Birkets’ My Sky Blue Trades, thusly: …dull from just about anyone, but coming from someone who seems to have done a little bit less than the average man of his day…it was particularly boring.
Hatchet Jobs is written with a thoroughgoing aplomb and in a spirit of entertainment no doubt vastly more engaging than the works being discussed. As a novelist himself, Peck is obviously self-interested in promoting the purchase, reading and enjoyment of fiction. And amid the jabs, cuts and slams, it is clear by his extensive research that he fully expects to be examined himself. For every dull book he is paid to read, Peck force-marches himself through the author’s oeuvre, slapping himself alert over many hundreds of doze-inducing pages, just in case there might have been something worthwhile earlier on. He then discusses the work in near excessive detail; these reviews are journal pieces, usually published in places where books are the general subject. They run to quite un-newspaperly lengths, usually three thousands words, some far longer.
Though the book is full of biting reductions, Hatchet Jobs is not all nastiness. Almost touching is Peck’s consideration of the fallen career of Kurt Vonnegut; the cult-meister’s albatross-like curse of trying to follow himself; the emptiness of his later fiction.
This is a book written so well that it can be enjoyed even if you haven’t read any of the works addressed. If Dale Peck can be critically checked at all in this effort it would be in the choosing of his targets. By the sampling offered in Hatchet Jobs, it is clear he has given the up-and-comers most of his ink; eschewing, or perhaps simply not being assigned, terrific American writers like style-maker Cormac McCarthy, genre-breaker James Elroy, urban-cool master Don DeLillo, or first novelist Charles Frazier, whose Cold Mountain would have blown off Peck’s drowsiness in just a few sentences.
September 27, 2016
For the most part, Dale Peck is a smart reader and a fluent writer. I like a bold opinion and I love a withering screed. Several of the targets of Peck's criticism (I'm looking at you Sven Birkerts and Stanley Crouch) are overdue for a take-down and, uncharitable blowhards themselves, they'll get no crocodile tears from me. But the net result of reading these relentlessly nasty reviews in a collection was a dislike of Dale Peck that grew with each essay. I guess it's like comic relief in a thriller - the funny parts make the scary parts scarier. Similarly, a little generosity in a critic makes harsh critical judgments seem a little more righteous.
The unmixed bile on offer here is a disagreeable read. Peck's self-pitying complaints to the contrary, no one is trying to 'silence' him by labeling him a bitch. His bitchy tone assaults anyone with a metaphorical ear. Straw silencers, be damned! Peck can defend the still-beating heart of literature (his actual image, I kid you not*) with all the catty poison at his command. He may be the very soul of literary rectitude, but I don't like his company and I won't be spending any more time with him. There's entirely too much else to read out there.
*For someone with such sniffy, Brahminical sensibilities, Peck's own writing is replete with howlers like this in addition to appalling freshman comp mistakes such as subject/verb disagreement. Pretentious pseudo-sophisticate, heal thyself!
The unmixed bile on offer here is a disagreeable read. Peck's self-pitying complaints to the contrary, no one is trying to 'silence' him by labeling him a bitch. His bitchy tone assaults anyone with a metaphorical ear. Straw silencers, be damned! Peck can defend the still-beating heart of literature (his actual image, I kid you not*) with all the catty poison at his command. He may be the very soul of literary rectitude, but I don't like his company and I won't be spending any more time with him. There's entirely too much else to read out there.
*For someone with such sniffy, Brahminical sensibilities, Peck's own writing is replete with howlers like this in addition to appalling freshman comp mistakes such as subject/verb disagreement. Pretentious pseudo-sophisticate, heal thyself!
September 24, 2012
I don't have much patience for pompous blowhards. Pompous blowhard, thy name is Dale Peck.
Are there some valid points made in this book? Yes, some. That being said, I have far more respect when the opinions come from someone who has talent that outshines those who are the subject of the harsh criticism. Peck is not even close. It's as though a man who has crafted an adequate stained glass window turns around and starts screaming at the ghost of Louis Comfort Tiffany for producing "schlock." Sorry, Mr. Peck, but until you achieve the level of artistry as many of the authors you skewer, you don't have the wherewithal to paint yourself as the uber-lord of literature looking down your nose at "middlebrow drivel” that’s “celebrated in excess.”
Peck might better spend his time working on his own craft rather than tearing down the works of others.
Criticism is one thing, but jealous beat downs without backup is something else altogether.
Are there some valid points made in this book? Yes, some. That being said, I have far more respect when the opinions come from someone who has talent that outshines those who are the subject of the harsh criticism. Peck is not even close. It's as though a man who has crafted an adequate stained glass window turns around and starts screaming at the ghost of Louis Comfort Tiffany for producing "schlock." Sorry, Mr. Peck, but until you achieve the level of artistry as many of the authors you skewer, you don't have the wherewithal to paint yourself as the uber-lord of literature looking down your nose at "middlebrow drivel” that’s “celebrated in excess.”
Peck might better spend his time working on his own craft rather than tearing down the works of others.
Criticism is one thing, but jealous beat downs without backup is something else altogether.
May 29, 2007
While it's wrong to laud a critic merely for agreeing with me, that's what I'm going to do.
Peck doesn't really assert these points so much as posit them on his way to dismember his contemporaries, but since I find them excellent literary axioms, I'll repeat them:
-James Joyce's collection Dubliners--particularly the story "The Dead"--is one of the best in the prose fiction canon, but by Ulysses he is setting a pretty poor example.
-Thomas Pynchon is undeniably a fantastic writer but his his novels don't come together as anything approaching a cohesive whole.
-The folks who started postmodernism understood the difference between identification and projection, but most practitioners today work without this distinction, which while very convenient for them, is very boring to read.
-The critic Sven Birkerts is overrated.
Peck doesn't really assert these points so much as posit them on his way to dismember his contemporaries, but since I find them excellent literary axioms, I'll repeat them:
-James Joyce's collection Dubliners--particularly the story "The Dead"--is one of the best in the prose fiction canon, but by Ulysses he is setting a pretty poor example.
-Thomas Pynchon is undeniably a fantastic writer but his his novels don't come together as anything approaching a cohesive whole.
-The folks who started postmodernism understood the difference between identification and projection, but most practitioners today work without this distinction, which while very convenient for them, is very boring to read.
-The critic Sven Birkerts is overrated.
Read
February 5, 2009There is some truth to Peck's claim that his critics are more interested in "the possibility of a brawl" than in what he has to say about today's fiction. Reviewers say they can't fathom how the highly regarded author of the novel Now It's Time to Say Goodbye and What We Lost, the story of his father's 1950s childhood, has the audacity to vilify his colleagues. Although reviewers feel scandalized, disgusted, or fascinated by his sweeping condemnations (is Rick Moody really "the worst writer of his generation"?), most focus more on Peck's vulgarities than on the content of his critiques. Of the minority who confess that they looked twice at his reviews, many agree that they are entertaining, incisive, and worth all the hype.
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
November 23, 2012
He really dislikes some of the authors I like (DFW and Jonathan Franzen), but Peck has a sharp critical eye and a very engaging/caustic style. There is a very complimentary essay on Kurt Vonnegut at the end of the book, though, and that warmed my heart. I'm glad he doesn't hate everything.
November 30, 2009
An awful bunch of tantrums, written solely to garner the author some brief attention. I think he's writing teenage vampire sci-fi novels now, which, enough said.
June 24, 2008
I agree with him in principle but his execution lacks chop.
June 9, 2019
Moderately interesting. Not enough variation to make the entire book worth finishing.
January 17, 2022
Very enjoyable read. I would be honored, as a writer, to be reviewed by Dale. His reviews are so insightful.
March 15, 2023
I recently purchased the following books: 'The Peron Novel' by Tomas Eloy Martinez, 'I Served the King of England' by Bohumil Hrabal, 'The Language We use Up Here' by Philip Gambone, 'The Diary of an Innocent' by Tony Duvert, 'Whose Song' by Thomas Glave, 'Ourselves' by Jonathan Strong and Yves Navarre 'The Little Rogue in Our Flesh' - about the same time I read an article with a list of 'The Giants of Contemporary Literary Fiction' who were Saul Bellows, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Sven Birkerts, Colson Whitehead, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan, Jim Crace, Stanley Crouch, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace. None of the authors I have chosen to read are on the 'giants' list - at least four of my novels were not originally written in English (I am reading them in translation) so my comparison may be flawed - but even if I replaced those novels with ones written in English I know my list would still not contain any of the 'giants'. Indeed I am sure that amongst the 3,000 odd 'want to read' books I have listed on GoodReads none of the 'giants' appear.
I mention all this because I approached this book with some wariness because of my ignorance of so much of the 'contemporary literature' that literary critics regard as important. I needn't have worried - previously I had only Know Mr. Peck as a marvelous novelist; now I respect and admire him for demolishing so many sacred cows and laying bare the dead end road that so much contemporary literature is on.
Absolutely well worth reading - I adored what he had to say about Felice Picano's 'Like People in History' and Ethan Morden's 'How Long has this Been Going On' (just in case you imagined it was only SWM (straight white men) that he was knocking off their pedestals) and I wish I could demolition overblown mediocre writing with such style and perception.
I mention all this because I approached this book with some wariness because of my ignorance of so much of the 'contemporary literature' that literary critics regard as important. I needn't have worried - previously I had only Know Mr. Peck as a marvelous novelist; now I respect and admire him for demolishing so many sacred cows and laying bare the dead end road that so much contemporary literature is on.
Absolutely well worth reading - I adored what he had to say about Felice Picano's 'Like People in History' and Ethan Morden's 'How Long has this Been Going On' (just in case you imagined it was only SWM (straight white men) that he was knocking off their pedestals) and I wish I could demolition overblown mediocre writing with such style and perception.
Read
July 29, 2019Some readers have complained that this aptly titled work isn't as meaningful or useful as B. R. Myers' A READER'S MANIFESTO and I agree, but I still enjoy Peck's eviscerations of what passes for contemporary American literature. (The one recent book he discusses that I've read, Sven Birkerts' GUTENBERG ELEGIES, I liked more than he did but I have no problem taking his word for how awful most of the others are.) In my view, Peck runs into trouble when he attempts a deeper analysis of what went wrong with fiction, making James Joyce his pet villain. Seems Joyce (so says Peck) showed real promise when he wrote "The Dead" but then darn it, he got self-indulgent and blew it with A PORTRAIT and ULYSSES. Peck ignores, or misses, some key points here, such as (A) Joyce wrote only four works of fiction, so rather than having a lot of works to deal with, his readers have a few works to deal with, albeit works that must be dealt with intensely if one is to understand them at all. (B) With Joyce, it's "in for a penny, in for a pound." If you don't want to spend a lot of time on critical thinking you should read other writers. (C) No one had to be influenced by Joyce who didn't want to be. And of course, (D)It's not Joyce's fault if later writers weren't, or aren't as good as he was. Peck is a born hatchet man and that's fine, as long as he doesn't try to be a constructive critic.
Read
March 9, 2010I read this book because I dislike most contemporary literary fiction. So does this author. So I was hoping that I would learn more about why I hate most novels published within the last few years. Unfortunately these essays are mostly bitter, mean, and stupid, which is a shame, because many of them contain well-reasoned investigations of various authors.
The best essay was, to me, a sort of elegy for Kurt Vonnegut (which is strange, because he wasn't dead when this was published). I completely agreed with most of Dale Peck's assessment of Vonnegut, whose characters grapple with the futility of free will in the face of a chaotic and indifferent universe. Peck makes the point that Vonnegut's early novels contain "tragic heroes" who refuse to accept the absurdity of their existences, whereas in his later novels his main (often autobiographical) characters mostly surrender to either absurdity or death. Which effectively renders them (and him) impotent.
Also, Sapphire got a half a million advance for Push? Seriously?
The best essay was, to me, a sort of elegy for Kurt Vonnegut (which is strange, because he wasn't dead when this was published). I completely agreed with most of Dale Peck's assessment of Vonnegut, whose characters grapple with the futility of free will in the face of a chaotic and indifferent universe. Peck makes the point that Vonnegut's early novels contain "tragic heroes" who refuse to accept the absurdity of their existences, whereas in his later novels his main (often autobiographical) characters mostly surrender to either absurdity or death. Which effectively renders them (and him) impotent.
Also, Sapphire got a half a million advance for Push? Seriously?
March 11, 2009
Don't read this and then try to write anything, ever.
The first piece is hilarious, a long-deserved crucifixion of the unconscionably boring Sven Birkerts; but then I stopped laughing when I hit the subsequent reviews, in which he CARVES INTO Wallace, Franzen, Moody, DeLillo, et al. Oh, and Joyce. And Faulkner.
Also, for someone who's so high and mighty about English syntax, he can at times write confusingly. There are oddly murky places in the prose, in sharp contrast to the sizzling lacerating wit which flares up like moths hitting a live wire. I wish I could corner him at a party and pepper him with all kinds of rude questions. But somehow I don't think Dale gets invited to many parties anymore. Unless as an entrée.
March 20, 2015
A mildly interesting bunch of essays and reviews that certainly takes no quarter with their topics. He doesn't like much, and is generally clear about why he doesn't. His picking apart of the opening of the Jim Crace novel is done much like an English teacher would, to show that the writing just doesn't make much sense. His high opinion of Vonnegut is a bit odd to me, and I think he misses the point of the narration of American Pastoral, but what he says about Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan and Sapphire seem right on to me.
A fairly entertaining read that cuts through a lot of linguistic garbage and speaks directly.
He doesn't think much of Ulysses, either, or much of Faulkner. I might look into Rebecca Brown to see if his praise there is worth anything.
A fairly entertaining read that cuts through a lot of linguistic garbage and speaks directly.
He doesn't think much of Ulysses, either, or much of Faulkner. I might look into Rebecca Brown to see if his praise there is worth anything.
September 2, 2008
I just finished reading this for the second time. For people who pay attention, Peck made a huge name for himself a few years ago when he starting swinging like crazy at writers he thought were wasting their talent, including his infamous line about Rick Moody being "the worst writer of his generation." I like him because, like James Wood, he actually cares about what's going on with books, not just getting a paycheck for writing his essay. This is one of those collections that add up to a mission statement about art instead of a grab bag of one-offs.
March 1, 2013
This is an entertaining and lucid collection of book reviews from a thoughtful, talented writer. Particularly amusing are the reviews in which Peck critiques Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and the other pretentious hacks who regularly receive critical fellatio from the rest of the literary establishment. Dale Peck does engage in hyperbole for dramatic effect, but most of these are considered and astute perspectives, the title notwithstanding.
May 19, 2008
Not only does Peck review books, providing criticism and analysis, but he criticizes critics and reviews book reviews.
Hehe.
He says nasty things about writers and reviewers. Tehe.
It's all very rousing and silly in an entertaining way. Plus it's short and small and fits in the front pocket of my brown corduroy jacket.
Hehe.
He says nasty things about writers and reviewers. Tehe.
It's all very rousing and silly in an entertaining way. Plus it's short and small and fits in the front pocket of my brown corduroy jacket.
July 19, 2008
Dale Peck has not really taught me anything about literature, but could write a damn monograph for OUP about the value of self-promoting bitchery. Bonus points: "David Foster Wallace, you can now sleep easy, because you have just been READ."
June 14, 2007
I never really read lit crit or reviews but I find Dale Peck hilarious and often spot on. So hit me.
January 20, 2013
talked about it here: http://5cense.com/earth.htm
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