Today I ran across this essay for the second time (this time via Bookslut). In it Dale Peck, book reviewer/novelist, bitches and moans that contemporary writers do not write to please him, or indeed any other common reader (Peck, who has earned both his reputation and his salary by being kind of a professional asshole, identifies his tastes with those of the common reader), and that James Joyce is to blame.
His argument is perhaps a bit more complex than that, but not very. Peck gets points for not insisting on a return to Victorian realism (even he can see where that road goes), but offers no real alternative to the contemporary novel. Presumably we are to take his novels as an example, but I have never read one, have never encountered anyone who has read one, and have never even encountered one in a book store.
Even The Telegraph, who published the essay, describes him being “notorious in America for his vitriolic book reviews”. Not his insightful book reviews, nor his engaging book reviews, nor even his competent book reviews (and of course he is not at all known for his novels), but his vitriolic book reviews. As I said: Peck is a professional asshole. He does not get paid because he thinks interesting thoughts, or because he communicates in any particularly excellent way; he is paid because he is rather good at being deliberately rude and controversial in print. Would that we all had such talent.
