It is necessary from time to time for someone to point out that most of the persons occupying the palace of literary reputation are wearing surprisingly few -- if any -- clothes. This was accomplished almost exactly two decades ago by a previously (and subsequently) unknown essayist named Bryan F. Griffin, who launched in the pages of Harper's a two-part tactical nuclear attack called "Panic Among the Philistines," an outcry against "the language of pretension" in gratuitously smutty, scatological books by writers passing themselves off as the literary elite. A few of Griffin's bombshells fell short of their targets, but on the big issues his instincts were sound, and his outburst was a refreshing antidote to the prevailing balderdash of the day.
Now comes the similarly unknown B.R. Myers, writing "A Reader's Manifesto" in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, to make similarly useful mischief. The issue has been out only a few days and already many readers have written to me in praise of it. Unlike Griffin, Myers does not seem especially hung up on gratuitous and/or explicit sexuality, but he too is offended by the language of literary pretension. Himself an admirer of old-fashioned narrative prose and "good 'Mandarin' writing," he finds precious little to admire in the "self-conscious, writerly prose" now in favor among the literati. What passes for literary art, he says, "is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average 'genre' novel."
The real service Myers performs is that he subjects the prose of several writers much in favor among those who hand out rave reviews and literary prizes -- Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and David Guterson -- to close textual analysis. In Proulx, he notes "her need to draw attention to her presence in her text"; McCarthy, he correctly points out, has lapsed from the "careful and restrained writing" of his fine first novel, "The Orchard Keeper," into "parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations"; DeLillo's prose (he focuses on the execrable novel "White Noise"), "describing suburbia as a wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the 1950s," is riddled with "spurious profundity"; Auster has a "weakness for facetious displays of erudition"; Guterson "thinks it more important to sound literary than to make sense."
Though I would take mild issue with Myers in regard to Auster -- I did like "Timbuktu," but then I confess to a soft spot for dog stories -- like Griffin two decades ago, he's got the big stuff right. In essence he's saying that the dominant themes of contemporary American "literary" fiction (and of the criticism that legitimizes it) are self-regard and self-promotion. Narcissism is the order of the day. There is nothing unusual about this, of course, since narcissism is the order of the day everywhere in American culture, but Myers is right to find it especially unwelcome in literature, which should be a window through which the writer regards the world rather than a mirror in which he merely gazes adoringly at himself.
It was not always thus. Myers looks back, as I too most certainly do, "to a time when authors had more to say than 'I'm a writer!'; when the novel wasn't just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket." He writes fondly of books such as Budd Schulberg's "What Makes Sammy Run" and John O'Hara's "Appointment in Samarra," in which it is amply demonstrated that "intellectual content can be reconciled with a vigorous, fast-moving plot." He notes with dismay the disdain in which such fiction is now held in proper literary circles, where the pretentious display of self-consciously "writerly" prose is valued while plot, narrative and character are scorned.
The question he does not explore is why, and how, serious popular fiction went into such a steep decline. "More than half a century ago," he writes, "popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce." That was no less true in the United States, where Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser and John O'Hara -- "popular storytellers," one and all -- simultaneously enjoyed critical renown and commercial success. Yet now not merely is such fiction scorned among the literati, precious little of it is even written. Apart from Saul Bellow, Anne Tyler, Larry McMurtry, Gail Godwin and Michael Chabon, there are scarcely any American novelists whose work has intellectual weight as well as popular appeal.
No doubt the rise of television and the disappearance of the big middlebrow magazines (the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, et al.) have much to do with it; the economic incentive to write fiction that is at once entertaining and substantial has declined sharply, and many who might have done such work a couple of generations ago now turn their talents to script-writing for movies and television. As has been argued in this space for far too many years, the schools of creative writing actively encourage the self-absorbed, mannered fiction that Myers so despises; since the gurus of these schools have become the pipelines via which young writers find agents and publishers, the only realistic prospect is that there will be more of such writing rather than less.
No doubt, too, modernism is much to blame. Modernism values the obscure and the difficult. In the hands of a few masters, this has produced masterworks. Mostly, though, it has produced third-rate imitations by third-rate artists, whose work is acclaimed out of a fear that not to acclaim it will expose the critic's failure to march in lockstep with the illuminati. It is no small irony that, for all the fixation on the individual self and its fluttering little psyche, what still drives the crowd is the herd instinct.
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardley@twp.com.
