Toppling the "Masters"

B. R. Myers, a contributing editor for the Atlantic, is a bit of a grouch. As far as I can tell he hasn't liked a single novel published in the last forty years, and most of his favorites were originally published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His book titled A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose (2002) is exactly what it claims to be. Though several reviewers (including Laura Miller on Salon.com and Meghan O'Rourke on Slate.com) have pointed out a few of the flaws in Myers's arguments, I have to admit that his jeremiad is useful to me as a writer--and admittedly fun to read.

What's interesting about Myers's tirades is that he equates the prose of every late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century novelist with the same terrible, Dan Brown level of artlessness*--particularly that written by the most well-respected of contemporary authors: Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, David Guterson, Jonathan Franzen, etc. All their work is crap, apparently.

Some of Myers's criticisms are hysterical enough (and intentionally so, I have to assume) that it's hard not to picture him sitting in a comfy chair in his den at home, reading the latest novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and railing aloud, to no one in particular, at the utter incompetence of the adjectivally overstuffed sentences that offend his eyes, then rushing over to his desk to type up a sternly worded assault on the poor author. I also can't help picturing little cartoon-expletives shooting out of his head à la Donald Duck in one of his pissier moods.

Personally, I liked DeLillo's White Noise and Underworld, Auster's New York Trilogy and Timbuktu, and consider McCarthy's The Road to be one of the most beautiful books I've ever read (despite its [comparatively] upbeat ending). But I can appreciate Myers's willingness to take contemporary literature's brightest stars to task for what he considers sloppy writing. It's one thing to read a scathing critique of Dan Brown's sophomoric prose (which is a lot like trash-talking the New Jersey Nets--even I can do it and I don't know a thing about sports); it's something else to take down one of the pillars of postmodernism, Don DeLillo, for utilizing clumsy tautologies and being guilty of writing banality masked as profundity, among other things.** He deconstructs the sentences and scenes written by his targets with such minute care that, even if his criticisms are a bit unfair (not seeing the forest for the trees and all that), he does have a valid point: Sentences are the building blocks of fiction and as such they should be written in the service of the whole.

I also appreciate Myers's willingness to be reviled by so many uptight fans of the books he trashes. He is not a popular guy in the realm of his chosen profession, and that takes guts.

I read Myers's essays to help me avoid writing sloppy prose. With that in mind, here are a few of my favorites:

1. Scoffing at the most celebrated novel of the year (so far anyway), Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

2. Bravely heckling Toni Morrison's A Mercy.

3. Rolling his eyes over Denis Johnson's National Book Award winner, Tree of Smoke.

4. Gleefully kicking sand in the face of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

5. Myers reviews Ian Robinson's Untied Kingdom, in which he finds a kindred spirit (sort of).

6. The Atlantic article on which Myers's A Reader's Manifesto was based.

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*There are exceptions, of course. Myers seems to have a slight appreciation for Stephen King, recommends the Houstons' memoir Farewell to Manzanar (though this is not a novel, you'll notice), and at least likes David Lodge's literary criticism, if not his novels. But nearly every other book Myers references in a positive light was written before 1960.

**He also accuses DeLillo of being unfunny, which I just don't get. The "Toyota Celica" sequence, which Myers excerpts in his book for other reasons, is one of the funnier moments in White Noise.