Who’s the Wanker?

B. R. Myers recently suggested that Denis Johnson, whose Tree of Smoke won this year’s National Book Award, is not “a great or even a good writer.” Myers admits to never having read Johnson’s other work, but he suspects that “once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there.”

Leaving aside issues of mere agreement or disagreement, this is a perfectly reasonable argument: 1) Tree of Smoke, for various reasons,* is bad; 2) we have conditioned ourselves to believe that Johnson is a great writer; 3) therefore, we do not actually see this book for what it is. Which is bad.**

This is an interesting point worth defending. And The Rake ought to be embarrassed for refusing to rebut Myers except to call him “Satan” and “a wanker.”

“Fuck you, BR Myers”? Really? That’s how one of our most astute litbloggers demonstrates a better approach to criticism?

* Read the review, but Myers focuses above all on the language of novels. This approach has much to recommend it—so few critics actually do that anymore—while also leaving unconsidered much of what makes novels worthwhile.

** This happens all the time.

PREVIOUSLY: B. R. Myers on aesthetics and Elmore’s adverbs

UPDATE: The Rake responds

Comments

[Richard]

I thought Myers' Reader's Manifesto was mostly terrible, though I tended to agree with his general complaints about reviewing and blurbing. So I have to admit that my instinct was to assume the Rake was on target. But after actually reading Myers' review, I have to agree with you here. Far less of the review is devoted to other reviewers' responses than I had been led to expect, and I don't think that focus is unwarranted, given how different his review is from others. I think he does a pretty good job demonstrating why Johnson's prose is bad, at least in this novel, and why the novel is bad. For what it's worth, all the excerpts others have given have left me wondering what the fuss is, and whenever I pick the book up in the stores, I can't get past that opening sentence. (I've previously read two Johnson books, neither of which left much of an impression on me, including Jesus' Son.)

[Rake]

I'm sorry, but I think you're seriously mischaracterizing my response (and giving BRM far too much credit).

Is it worth making an argument that (1) Tree of Smoke is bad and (2) reviewers are blinded to this fact because of Denis Johnson's reputation? Sure. But Myers is uninterested in making that argument; what he is interested in is re-asserting his sophomoric me-against-the-world stance, and doing so in the most condescending and hyperbolic manner possible.

I don't even care if the novel IS bad. What I care about is that Myers' argument is poor and offensive. I don't think that pulling out about half a page's worth of sentences from a 624-page novel is persuasive. At all. I could go through and get you some great writing from this book, I'm sure, and that doesn't necessarily make it a good book, either.

But Myers is worse than lazy: he doesn't even allow that there can be any disagreement over the quality of his cherry-picked passages, or the quality of the novel itself. He comes right out and not only accuses the proponents of Tree of Smoke (including Philip Roth(!)) of a conspiracy of misrepresentation, but takes it a step further and equates the misrepresentation of a novel--which in this case is no more than an aesthetic difference of opinion--with culpability in the misdeeds of the Bush Administration.

Again, could you carefully tie the "rot" of the bind between word and thing to how the Bush Administration deceives the public and press? Perhaps. But BRM doesn't even try to make a coherent, good faith argument. Like a sullen teenager, he starts with the premise that everyone is corrupt and a liar (except for himself, who can see through the veil) and uses one passage from Ezra Pound (!!) to bolster his point.

Let's put it this way: I'll mostly likely receive a copy of Tree of Smoke for Christmas, and if I happen to like the writing in it, I've already been called out as a danger to our culture and a co-conspirator in the continued incoherence and degeneracy of the United States government. Does this not sound hyperbolic and unfair to you? (That's a no sugar added precis of BRM's argument...and I'M the wanker here?)

I think I did a tad more than call Myers names, frankly, although I didn't spend as much time as I could have fisking him because there's no there there, as one of my high-ranking pals in Washington DC sez. "BR Myers is Satan" is obviously humorous overstatement. And if you're offended or underwhelmed by "Fuck you, BR Myers," well then so it must be. That's a crass and emotional, not intellectual, response, but that's the way I feel.

I find BRM's attempt to tie those who might disagree with his taste in sentences to Bush 43, silly, inappropriate, and offensive in the extreme. My post didn't exemplify "better criticism," perhaps, but I needed to get out my opinion that Myers has gone too far in his aesthetic bigotry. Frankly, I feel sad that I've wasted even this much time on this sorry excuse for a book critic.

[Brendan Wolfe]

Whew. Thanks for the reply. And let me say that I'd like to continue this dialogue with all due respect. Be gone, charges of who's a wanker and who's not!

You say that you "don't think that pulling out about half a page's worth of sentences from a 624-page novel is persuasive."

This implies that Myers' quotes are somehow arbitrary, that he must believe that the existence of any infelicitous writing automatically renders the book a fraud. But this seriously mischaracterizes HIS essay.

He uses examples from Johnson's novel to demonstrate a terribly written opening which, in turn, exhibits poor characterization, leading Myers to the observation that the novel lacks complex characters. He observes that the story is sluggish and overly long and then uses additional examples to argue that Johnson's action feels inauthentic and lacks fear and tension. He shows us some bad dialogue and suggests that Johnson is a victim of the inelegant variation. He wags a reviewer's finger at point-of-view problems, connects this to Johnson's problem with style and context in general, and then proceeds to a rather more ambitious argument about Johnson's inability to comprehend the spiritual dimension of people's lives.

Set aside, if you can, Myers' hyperbole. Set aside his condescension. Set aside all of those things that seem to infuriate you so. This critical approach is hardly "worse than lazy." It is hardly "cherry-picking."

Myers even goes so far as to "defy anyone to argue that those [infelicities] quoted here are not representative of every page of Tree of Smoke." But do you defy him? No. You call him names.

I'm not here to defend Myers' opinions, only to suggest that those who would tell him to fuck off not do so without bothering to make an argument themselves. That you don't make such an argument is neither "offensive" to me nor "underwhelming"; it simply forfeits from you the right to call anyone else lazy. More than that, though, it's too bad, because your writing is normally so good.

Up to now I've avoided what I suspect is the real source of heat in your post and then in this comment: Myers' claim, via Pound, that "Literati who contribute to the rot -- whether to preserve a writer's reputation, to stimulate the book market, or simply to go with the flow -- have no right to complain about incoherent government."

I'm not sure what to make of this, to be honest. And I don't blame you for being offended.

But your outrage blinds you to the nub of his point: praising Johnson or blasting Johnson is more than a mere "aesthetic difference of opinion." It is an enterprise that ought to be governed by respect for "the application of word to thing." Myers tries to live up to that. Chop off that last paragraph of his, and I'd say he makes a decent go of it.

[Rake]

I tried to be clear about what I was arguing and said that it might well be that ToS is terrible. (As I have been considering whether or not to lay out for the hardcover, I cannot speak to ToS's quality or lack thereof and therefore cannot "defy" BRM's assessment of this book. I can and will attest to quality of Angels and Jesus' Son.)

And I did rebut at least a little by linking to a post at Ward Six that highlights what another person (a published author, no less) thinks is some good writing in ToS. Again, that doesn't prove anything, necessarily, and I maintain it's a fool's errand to have to sift through a long novel and pull out brief counterexamples (felicities) that "defy" Myers and his chosen infelicities. (Don't you think his use of "defy"--as in, I dare you to defy me--is instructive in and of itself?)

Could Johnson have struck out with this book? Maybe. But I simply don't find Myers persuasive on this point, because his samples are too small to represent the whole. It's as if Myers saw one Barry Bonds at bat in which Bonds swung at three bad pitches and then concluded that people who think Bonds is a great or even good hitter are liars. Wouldn't you feel a little cheated if you came up to him with tape of great Bonds ABs to counter-argue and he just shrugged his shoulders and said, Well, I didn't see THOSE.

Or, taking it another way, I can selectively highlight a dozen of Barry Bonds' almost 10,000 career ABs and build a case that he's an awful hitter who strikes out all the time. That doesn't mean it's a great case. (Further, I can perform the same surgery on Ulysses, or any great novel, and look noble and brilliant in the absence of the text as a whole.)

To the other point, I don't see why it's in my interest to ignore Myers' hyperbole and condescension; in my opinion, his reviews are in print for little but those qualities. You want to cut out his BS argument tying Johnson admirers to Bush supporters/enablers, but that's the place he's trying to get to all review long. For what reason I can't possibly imagine, but it is his goal to make with the manifesto (again). Besides, you'd have to cut off the first paragraph, too, since his intentions are very clear from the outset.

Myers might be getting at some truths about ToS, but they seem to be incidental, in that his overarching project is to use Johnson to once again call out current literature and its adherents and critics as ignorant at best and willfully corrupt at worst. Why should I have to weather these meta-criticisms (again) just to get an assessment of Tree of Smoke? I can get a mixed or negative review of it elsewhere without all the unnecessary hostility and dime-store polemics.

BRM always starts with a hostile stance, assuming everyone is stupid or lying. He pulls out, say, the opening of DeLillo's White Noise, pronounces the writing terrible, and continues from there by casting aspersions on the character of someone who'd like such a bunch of tripe in the first place. He overreaches, past the text and author, and does so specifically to insult readers. If you counter by saying that you like the opening of White Noise, then either your aesthetic taste is terrible or, worse, you have a vested interest in making or keeping DeLillo popular, so of course you'd say that.

As for forfeiting my right to call another person lazy, you must be joking. I don't find that I'm being particularly lazy in this case--perhaps if you focus solely on the cursing that's so--but it so happens that I am a little lazy, in general. Therefore, I can identify laziness in others when I see it, and I think we could all afford to be less lazy, Myers included. (He clearly gets to use the royal "we" in the first paragraph when he clearly doesn't intend to include himself, so why not grant me the same latitude?)

[Brendan Wolfe]

Thanks again for your response. But I’m not at all convinced by your Barry Bonds analogy. Here’s why: B. R. Myers is not using a few arbitrary quotations from a 600-page novel to damn everything that Denis Johnson ever wrote. He instead uses a few carefully chosen passages to make his argument that THIS novel is a bad one. He does this, as I pointed out, by connecting those passages to what he considers to be serious problems in character, point of view, plot, action, et al. In other words, the novel is not bad simply because those passages are bad, but because those passages point to lots of other even more important problems.

If this critical heavy lifting did not take up the majority of his longish essay, then I would concede to you many if not most of your points. But it does. So when you say, “I simply don’t find Myers persuasive on this point, because his samples are too small to represent the whole” -- I wonder what it is you expect. As someone who is now working on an 800-word review of a 300-page book, I ask you, How can I possibly represent the whole? How do I provide a sample large enough to satisfy you of my numerous concerns with character, point of view, plot, action . . .

Or maybe satisfying you needn’t be the end-all of a review. I mean, it’s perfectly reasonable that you don’t find this one persuasive. Myers does write polemics, and none of us is obligated to succumb to his often blunt charms. But lack of evidence hardly seems to be the issue. Rather, you seem to be offended by his attitude, his ideology, his predisposition. I don’t blame you; I just don’t take it personally the way you do. I didn’t feel attacked the way you did. I, too, haven’t read the novel, so I can’t count myself as one of those corrupted literati falsely praising the book. But if I HAD read it, and if I HAD liked it, would I have then felt the need to defend myself against charges of being a Bush-supporter? Not at all. (I’m not convinced that this is what Myers is saying, by the way -- although I think the politics of his argument is a stretch at best -- but either way, the charge would be absurd on its face.) To the contrary, I would have used this review as I might any review: to question and defend my own assumptions.

That, in the end, is what Myers is demanding.

Okay. I might have altruistically gone about questioning and defending my own assumptions only AFTER telling Myers to go fuck himself -- but there’s something about this act of publicly saying “fuck you” that shuts down debate. (“No shit,” chimes in my internal editor.) You can accuse Myers of being arrogant and condescending, but I don’t think he shuts down debate. Instead, he opens it up by “defying” us to prove him wrong. You have seem to have a problem with that, with him daring us to say different. I don’t understand why. It’s not a fool’s errand to counterpunch Myers; that’s the whole point. That’s discussing books.

When you say “Fuck you” instead of truly engaging him, you only end up proving his point.

[Christian]

Thanks for this conversation. I tend to agree with the Rake (and I appreciated the humor in his post), but I also understand Brendan's point about Myers focusing "above all on the language of novels" and it's something I'd like to see more of in criticism. But does anyone notice that Myers tends to sound like an alien when he does a close reading?

Some of the prose he quotes is pretty bad, but the quibble about whether someone standing in a noisy place could hear his heartbeat or pulse comes across as petty at best. It wouldn't be hard to find examples of questionable sense observations in most canonical works. I'm reminded, maybe because Myers twice compares Johnson unfavorably to Tolstoy, of the scenes in Anna Karenina told from the persective of Levin's dog. It makes me wonder how he would respond to that, but I can't even guess because he never says why Tolstoy, whose prose in its Russian original (which I can't read) I'm told has its share of idiosyncrasies, is so good relative to Johnson.

My other big issue was his complaint about how Johnson "fills the space between purple passages by dropping his sentence subjects, leaving bursts of adjectives to stand alone" and then follows it with a passage that, setting aside any qualitative judgments, comes right out of the modernist playbook. Joyce and Faulkner used the same techniques, and I've seen him give them (at least tacitly) his endorsement elsewhere.

Who in this room has actually read Tree of Smoke?

And on the relationship between word and the thing: an indicator of Myers' general lousiness as a critic is that his assessments, however persuasive-sounding, tend to bear less resemblance to the actual objects under review (if we bother to read them) than Denis Johnson's descriptions do to the objects he's attempting to describe. Which is a roundabout way of accusing Myers of writing in bad faith.

There are critics with whom I frequently disagree who write in good faith. Updike is one. We may disagree with Updike's take on something, but we rarely feel that he's mischaracterized it. Myers is a serial mischaracterizer. Which seems worse than being a novelist who exercises poetic license...even a novelist who sometimes strays into infelicity.

Finally, when Myers claims that the opening sentence of ToS is bad, does that make it so? Can someone tell me why it's supposed to be bad? I like the way that pluperfect "had," strategically ungrammatical, sets us up to expect something to happen in the imperfect. Something has happened, the sentence tells us. Yes, Kennedy has died, but something else...something, presumably, more personal. Thus does the book announce (quietly) its aspirations to be something more than the settled history Myers - a myopic literalist - seems to wish it was. Which means that this is the point when he should have put down the book and walked away.

You may not agree with this prestidigitatious close-reading. That's your right. Which only goes to show the limitations of the Myers method, no? One needs something more than attentiveness to language to be a great critic. One needs attunement.

[Alan]

"Something has happened, the sentence tells us. Yes, Kennedy has died, but something else...something, presumably, more personal."

This is quite right. Kennedy died at 1 PM US Central Time, which would have been 1 AM in Vietnam.

So the sentence "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed" is not actually trying to say that Kennedy died (perfect tense) at that time. That wouldn't make sense. What the sentence is doing is evoking the experience of a character who is awoken in the middle of the night in Vietnam to the news that Kennedy HAD BEEN killed.

This narrative immersion in a character's point of view can also be seen in the following passage, which I clipped when I found it quoted in a review, about the last moments of a missionary priest:

“He turned and saw among the sago fronds a most curious sight: a Western man in Western garb holding a long tube to his lips. Something like a bamboo reed. As Carignan examined this sight and prepared to make some sort of greeting, the man’s cheeks collapsed and something stung the padre in the flesh over his Adam’s apple and seemed to lodge there. He reached up to brush it away. His tongue and lips began to tingle, his eyes burned, and within seconds the sensation was that of having no head at all, and then of losing touch with his hands and feet, and abruptly he didn’t know where any part of him was, every part of him seemed to go away. He did not feel himself collapsing toward the water, and by the time he landed in it he was dead.”

And also in this description, taken from another review, of (coincidentally) another man's last moments:

"Both men were distracted by a small rat or frog hopping boldly into the room through the front door. The colonel astonished Hao by reacting to this intrusion violently, flinging himself bodily at the small man and knocking him backward, chair and all, so that the back of Hao’s head struck the packed dirt floor and a pain burst over his sight like an explosion of freezing needles. His vision cleared as the object, for that is what it was, and not some rodent, stopped only a meter from his face, and he understood that it was probably a grenade; it was his death."

I haven't read the novel so I don't know which is more representative, those two very good passages or the more dubious ones that Myers quotes (if they are, in fact, as bad as he makes them seem when read in context).

But I do appreciate when reviewers cite passages showing the kind of thing they like or don't like in a work. These are examples, not "samples"--not the corpus of data on which the reviewer's judgement is based (that would be the whole novel, presumably), but rhetorical illustrations of the judgement arrived at. It's no argument against a review to say it doesn't prove its case. The purpose of a review is not to prove anything but to set forth an opinion.

[Brendan Wolfe]

I'm not sure it's possible to be a "serial mischaracterizer" of novels. Or at least I'm not convinced by Anonymous above. Still, I do appreciate the arguments in favor of the "strategically ungrammatical" -- by Anon and by Alan. This is great stuff. Thank you.