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+---
+title: Yikes
+date: '2002-07-18T06:33:01-04:00'
+permalink: /yikes/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+Should a reviewer of contemporary fiction actually be required to, say, like contemporary fiction?
+
+The question is raised for me by Dale Peck’s [review](http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020701&s=peck070102&c=1) of Rick Moody’s [The Black Veil](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0316578991), steered my way by faithful reader [BT](http://www.wombatfile.com). The review is not so much a review as a skewering, and not so much a skewering as an explosion of bile and vitriol. From the very first line:
+
+> Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.
+
+And a bit further on:
+
+> When I finished *The Black Veil* I scrawled “Lies! Lies! All lies!” on the cover and considered my job done.
+
+If, however, the strongest conclusion that I drew from this review was that Dale Peck really, really, really doesn’t like Rick Moody, I’d say hey, to each his own, whatever. I read [The Ice Storm](http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66UQJ18C6P&isbn=0316706000) (granted, after having seen the movie), and enjoyed and appreciated much about it — for instance, I did not find the novel, as Peck does, to have “a troubling fascination with adolescent sexual organs” so much as a concern with the ways that adolescents’ preoccupation with their own sexual organs is driven by the simultaneously prurient and passionless obsessions of the grownups who are ostensibly raising them — but that’s a matter of interpretation and taste. Peck doesn’t like Moody. Whatever.
+
+But then there’s this, when Peck attempts to figure out how American literary culture can have gone so wrong as to lionize such a pathetic figure as Moody:
+
+> In my view, the wrong turn starts around the time Stephen Dedalus goes to college in *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* and echoes all the way through Don DeLillo’s ponderously self-important rendering of Bobby Thompson’s shot heard round the world in the opening chapter of *Underworld.*
+
+In fact, the article, by its conclusion, comes to damn contemporary writers by association the entire lineage of twentieth-century fiction dating back to Joyce:
+
+> All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A 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; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.
+
+Peck’s not wholly off base, I think, in his assessment of postmodernism as a “white man’s ivory tower,” or in his suggestion that the dominance of this select group of writers has skewed the contemporary high-literary scene toward sterile experimentation devoid of affect and compassion. But one nonetheless wonders how useful this kind of judgment is in a piece that arguably supposed to tell whether to buy Moody’s latest or not.
+
+So again, the question: should a reviewer of contemporary fiction actually be required to like contemporary fiction?
+