In July 2002, the New Republic ran a review of Rick Moody's novel The Black Veil which began with the (for Moody) unforgettable words: "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." The review, by the novelist Dale Peck, went on to say: "The Black Veil is the worst of Rick Moody's very bad books." It was a comprehensive hatchet job, yet - as Peck guilelessly complains - it has been remembered in literary circles largely for its opening sentence.
Peck, who has called himself "one of the best writers around," attracted widespread abuse for the vehemence of his attack on Moody. The novelist Stanley Crouch, who had been skewered by Peck, described him as a "troubled queen." But the most celebrated contribution to this battle of the books was also the longest and the most belated - a 9,000-word essay by Heidi Julavits in the March 2003 issue of the US magazine the Believer. She listed Peck among a number of writers who used book reviews as an opportunity "to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals - or even try to understand… what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly." She called these reviewers "snarks," and instituted a "snarkwatch" feature in the Believer, which wryly set out to raise reviewing standards.
Peck was not slow to make the link between Julavits's attack and her involvement with the McSweeney's set of young American writers, who are now the explicit focus for his ire. In the review, he placed Moody at the dog-end of a literary inheritance stretching from "the diarrhoeic flow of words that is Ulysses" to the "stupid - just plain stupid - tomes" of Don DeLillo, via Nabokov, Barth, Barthelme and Gaddis. Peck thinks that all these writers have been strutting around for too long in the invisible lingerie of high modernism. He casts himself as the whistleblower, prefacing this volume of reviews - 12 excoriations and a eulogy - with a defensive epigraph from William Carlos Williams: "All I said was: there, you see, it is broken."
He is pictured on the cover of the book with his well worn axe slung over his shoulder, giving zero credibility to his promise in the introduction that he has now buried the hatchet. Indeed, some commentators have noted a cycle of abuse in Peck's criticism. A few have even made the link to his memoir, What We Lost, a chronicle of dizzying layers of familial abuse tumbling down the generations, and have suggested that he doles out castigation in order to solicit it. But hasn't book reviewing always been home to the most dysfunctional members of the literary family?
Although Julavits's piece was in its turn derided by the New Republic as "a publicity spree disguised as a mission statement," she did raise a pertinent question: who or what does a book review best serve? The reader? The author? The culture? The critic? It is a difficult question to answer, partly because book reviews do one thing under the guise of another. They pretend to address the general reader, who in fact rarely looks at them, while they are avidly consumed by publishers and booksellers, who use them in order to decide how to sell books. A good review rarely makes a bestseller - Stephen King is in no need of reviews in the New Republic or the London Review of Books - but reviews are oxygen for midlist authors, which is why Peck's hatchet jobs are so powerful, so cruel and so unnecessary.
He is deeply mistrustful of all tastes except his own, blithely confessing: "I can't tell you what fiction is, but I know it when I see it." Of Jim Crace's works he says definitively: "they're not novels." And anyone who disagrees with him - especially anyone who enjoys The Black Veil - must be blind, or an idiot, or both: "my gut feeling is that if you honestly don't believe it's bad then you're part of the problem."
Well, up to a point, Lord Chopper. Literary culture is always going to be pluralistic. Readers and writers have manifold allegiances, and one of the respectable tasks of book reviewing is to bring these allegiances to light, to reveal the web which holds the author quivering at its centre. Reviewers are themselves caught up in this network with their own likes and dislikes. And yet there is a myth that the book reviewer should represent a higher state of being, removed from the hurly-burly and able to make detached critical assessments. Despite so proudly voicing his own subjective opinions, Peck continues to believe that his role as a critic gives him ex officio access to the truth about literature.
It is a shame, having taken this stand, that his own standards are so low. Even his epigraph is misattributed - it may be William Carlos Williams, but the lines don't appear in my copy of Spring and All. Nor am I familiar with the expression, "down at the heels," said of a Julian Barnes character. Does he means down at heel or down at the mouth? And why does Rick Moody need to be pulled up over the phrase "murder of innocents," which Peck reads as tautological, "a redundancy on a par with wet water," and not an allusion to Matthew 2:16? Not only is he inaccurately pedantic, Peck is crushingly repetitive.
Peck never puts the really big fish in his frying pan. Franzen, Eugenides and Eggers live to write another day. Zadie Smith receives just a sneering allusion to her Oxbridge education. Peck completely ignores Jonathan Safran Foer, an affiliate of the McSweeney's set whose formal inventiveness is coupled with vigorous deployment of both plot and character. Nor can he explain why the McSweeney's have adopted Nick Hornby, not known as a pretender to Pynchon's throne. Peck promises to take on a generation, and ends up spitting at a few B-listers.
