“One opens The Atlantic Monthly and is promptly introduced to a burst of joyless contrarianism. Tiring of it, one skims ahead to the book reviews, only to realize: this is the book review. A common experience for even the occasional reader of B.R. Myers, it never fails to make the heart sink. The problem is not only one of craft and execution. Myers writes as if the purpose of criticism were to obliterate its object. He scores his little points, but so what? Do reviewers really believe that isolating a few unlovely lines in a five hundred page novel, ignoring the context for that unloveliness, and then pooh-poohing what remains constitutes a reading? Is this what passes for judgment these days?
If so, Myers would have a lot to answer for. But in the real world, instances don’t yield general truths with anything like the haste of a typical Myers paragraph (of which the foregoing is a parody). And so, even as he grasps for lofty universalism, Brian Reynolds Myers remains sui generis, the bad boy of reviewers, lit-crit’s Dennis Rodman.”
Somewhere in a volcanic lair, stroking his snowy long-haired cat, in front of a huge war-room map of the world, with glowing lights to indicate the location of every living poet, William Logan is plotting revenge against Garth Risk Hallberg for not recognizing him as the original Dennis Rodman of reviewing. Beware, Mr. Hallberg! Muahaha!
Kidding. This was an enjoyable reposte, from The Millions.
2 comments:
o, we must know that he is pointing out inescably bad prose, which is exhibited ad exhaustum in franzen's new novel.
much fairer than, say, robbins.
I can't say! Haven't read the darn thing.
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