The Reading Experience

The Prestige of Exclusivity

Caleb Crain warns us that

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become 'an increasingly arcane hobby.'

I'm not really all that bothered by the idea that reading will one day perhaps be confined to a "reading class," primarily because, as far as literature is concerned, it more or less already is. It may be true that "In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months." and that "The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002." That something around 50% of Americans still read poetry or fiction at all doesn't finally seem that bad to me, but this measure is not very rigorous: These are the numbers of people who self-reported reading at least one "work of creative literature," and we can probably safely guess that for many--probably most--only one or two such works per year is probably the more accurate report. Thus, those of us who read works of literature on a regular basis, who don't even necessarily read "for pleasure" but out of a deeply felt need that makes it seem impossible to us that reading might someday disappear, are no doubt even now practicing what seems to non-readers an "arcane hobby."

The use of the word" hobby," of course, is meant to disturb us, to shock us out of our complacency about the written word's loss of "the prestige of exclusivity." What kind of world will it be if literacy were to become only a "hobby," as if the ability to read were merely something a few people chose to do in their spare time? (In this future, rather than spend his Saturdays in the basement doing woodwork, Dad might be squirreled away in a damp corner, reading with a flashlight so the kids won't see his shame?) But that reading might one day be the exclusive privilege of those who actually like to do it, that books might be written for those who want to read them rather than for those who don't, doesn't finally seem to me a cause for lament. I feel confident enough that the appeal of "great books" is sufficiently constant that there will always be a fairly sizable group of intrepid people who will want to be able to discover for themselves what they have to offer.

But really Crain isn't so much interested in whether literature will survive. Although he begins his essay by citing the NEA report (which alerted us to the decline in interest in "creative literature") and further points out that schoolchildren are especially losing interest in “reading for literary experience,” most of his discussion of literacy vs. "orality" focuses on the superiority of the former in processing information, not on the loss of literature. Indeed, Crain sums up the research of linguist Walter Ong in this way:

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk.

If anything, the "oral mind-set" is more likely to express itself through a "literary experience," through an account of the world as related through story. Abstract concepts and analysis are the tools of philosophy, not literature, and while I ultimately do not think literature can be reduced to the telling of stories (the "literary" lies elsewhere than in the entanglements of story, although it is just as irreducible to "ideas"), it also does not depend on the reader's ability to "rotate" abstractions and is not strictly commensurate with the "calm and abstract investigations" literacy in Crain's definition makes possible.

Crain's reliance on a definition that privileges expository discourse as the object of reading is made only more explicit when he cites "a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves" or when he concludes that "in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with." I'm certainly not going to dispute that a literate society is preferable to an illiterate one, but few if any of these dangers the new illiteracy poses, at least according to Crain's analysis, threaten to undermine or endanger the literary tradition. The vast majority of technically literate people have always been at best indifferent to this tradition, and it won't be any more irrelevant to the mass of non-readers when they're officially illiterate.

I agree with Anna Clark in spirit when she suggests that "The urgency [Crain's essay] inspires is of duty, not of excitement--exactly the wrong way to promote reading. The N.E.A. and New Yorker article make people feel bad because they *should* be reading more, because reading is good for you, like Vitamin C." But I think Crain's cautionary report is directed less at the individual reader who is shirking her duty than at society as a whole, the literate elite of which doesn't seem to realize what is happening. It's more concerned about the consequences for "culture" than for any particular set of readers. Myself, I don't believe that continual handwringing about "secondary orality" is going to make our culture less inimical to serious writing and reading than it obviously is, nor will threatening non-readers with the label "illiterate" frighten many of them into taking their Vitamin C. Perhaps it would be better simply to reinforce the enthusiasm of actually existing readers for their "arcane hobby" and let Culture take care of itself.

The Farther Shore--A Dissenting View

I'm going to have to register a dissent from my Litblog Co-op colleagues' choice of Matthew Eck's The Farther Shore as this quarter's Read This! selection. It's not a bad book, just thoroughgoingly ordinary. (Aside from its setting in a war zone, which is the only reason I can fathom why anyone would single out the novel for special praise. It's "exotic," unfamiliar to most of us civilian readers, but, speaking for myself, this doesn't mean I'm going to give it any special dispensation when assessing its literary merits.)

In his discussion of the novel, Matt Cheney admits he initially wondered why the author hadn't recorded his wartime experiences (in the early 90s; The Farther Shore seems pretty clearly set in Somalia, although the country is never named) as a memoir rather than a novel. This seems to me a pertinent question, and I have to say I was less clear about the answer than Matt seems to have been. The Farther Shore recounts the experience of an American soldier on a "lost patrol," and although I don't know if the protagonist's journey exactly mirrors Eck's own (in an interview, the author does say that after completing the book "I felt like I owned Joshua Stantz’s experience"), the depiction of war as frightening, uncertain, repulsive, etc. is of a sort that could just have easily been conveyed in a memoir. While I didn't find that the novel descended into "politics and polemics" or into what Matt identifies as a kind of masculine "sentimentality," nevertheless, I never felt that the writer was sufficiently attuned to the formal possibilities of fiction to justify this story appearing as fiction rather than narrative nonfiction.

Anne Fernald acknowledges that the novel's story and setting are "familiar": "[they] come as much from Hemingway and Hollywood as from experience. And even the protagonist, Joshua Stantz, is a familiar type: the sensitive young man, in over his head, smarter than his sergeant and counting the days until he can go home and apply to college through the G.I. Bill." However, "The prose is so elegant and thoughtful that this very familiar structure--of soldiers cut off from the army, working their way back--seems not formulaic but classic." Unfortunately, the "very familiar structure" never reached the status of "classic" for me. It seems such an obvious invocation of The Naked and the Dead or Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato that I had to wonder if it was just a deliberate homage to such novels or whether Eck might be trying to critique the standard war narrative by hewing to it in such a conspicuous way. In the end, however, it doesn't really matter: the novel is so conventionally plotted--with all the appropriate pauses for scenes of carnage and brutality that especially horrify the protagonist's still-developing sensibilities--and its characters so utterly familiar that it can't sustain an interpretation attributing a more self-reflexive or more elaborate design to it. It simply seems to imitate war novels of the past.

I can't say I found the prose especially "elegant," either, although it is certainly competent and moves the story along at a relatively brisk pace. At times, however, I did think it strained too much for effect, for the no-bullshit honesty of tone we associate with war fiction, particularly when related in the first-person. The novel's very first paragraph, in fact, seemed to gesture after sigificance in this way:

It was dark, midnight, and heat like that should have disappeared. Then the bombing started. Those poor souls, the poor fucks of the city, had no idea we were watching from rooftop of the tallest building in town, six sets of eyes in the night, calling in rounds from the circling AC-130 Spectres. When they fired too close to the city's edge we'd make a call for them to move further out, into the unknown. When they veered too far out over the desert, and the city couldn't feel the shudders anymore, we made another call. It was a tightrope, a balancing act, a burden we adored. We were spotters on the roof, recon in a city controlled by warlords and their clans.

This sounds too much like a movie's opening voice-over, relies too much on cliche ("It was dark, midnight"; "into the unknown"; "a tightrope, a balancing act") and calcuated earthiness ("the poor fucks of the city") for me to call it either "elegant" or "thoughtful." It mostly calls out to the reader in a rather ostentatious fashion: "War story coming!"

In an interview with Levi Asher, Matthew Eck asserts that he "joined the army because I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I’d been reading Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien and Ernest Hemingway and it just seemed like the right thing to do to gather life experience and meaning and understanding—all those clichés." I'm sorry to say that The Farther Shore reads like the product of some such pre-formulated program. Rather than letting the experience determine the form its subsequent expression might take, the form--war novel--has been imposed on the experience. The inherited conventions of the war novel have been handled with some
skill, but the book never impresses as more than an exercise in organizing those conventions. It tells us nothing new about war--although of course there may be nothing new to say--but ultimately tells us even less about what fiction might be made to do.

One People

Richard Jenkyns believes that, although a "canon" of literary works is necessary in providing us with a stock of appropriate "shared references," such a canon does not have to be exlusively "high cultural."

It is surely vain to suppose that poorly educated and disaffected young Asians can be brought to a stronger sense of belonging in Britain by a diet of Hamlet, Middlemarch and the Psalms. The truth is that shared references and resonances mostly need to evolve naturally, that most of them derive from popular culture, and that many of them are like family jokes. Television has had enormous power as a unifier; this power is now declining with the proliferation of channels and new media, but in their time Morecambe and Wise did more than Milton and Wordsworth to make us feel one people.

The obvious flaw in this argument comes from that "in their time." The accomplishments of Morecambe and Wise notwithstanding, the ultimate point of a canon is that it includes "shared references" that are timeless, not merely of unifying value in a particular historical era. Unless future generations will likely value Morecambe and Wise as much as those "in their time" did (although, who knows, maybe they will), there seems little point in enshrining them in a "canon," which will only come to seem as much an imposition on the tastes of those later generations as Milton and Wordsworth.

(I'd love to see Monty Python's Flying Circus become canonical, but something tells me that 50 years from now not everyone will find the show quite as bracingly funny as I did when first exposed to it in the mid-1970s. To in effect insist that it is that funny by enshrining it in a canon would not accomplish much.)

Jenkyns correctly locates the origin of our notions of a canon in the deliberations of the Church over which Biblical texts deserved its official sanction, but he doesn't really much discuss the two primary purposes for which the concept of the canon has been adapted to secular culture: to help enhance "national greatness" and to create academic curricula. (Sometimes the two projects overlap.) A canon of great writers focuses attention on the cultural accomplishments a country can claim, the contributions it has made to "culture" and "literature" on a broader, global scale. (Thus, say, Great Britain can claim that "its" poetry is perhaps the greatest any nation has produced.) It also allows the academic study of literature to claim for itself a "subject" of study. "Literature" as a disembodied category of "great writing" is unsustainable as the foundation of a curriculum of study; a semi-official list of sufficiently great writers and texts to justify their inclusion in a prescribed set of courses is needed to give literary studies the status of a "discipline," the core elements of which students will be expected to master.

Because I've never been able to accept the asssumptions behind either of these impulses to canon-building, I've never invested much energy in defending the canon against its supposed enemies, those identified by Harold Bloom as the "School of Resentment." Although I agree with Bloom that much of the hostility directed at canonical writers is misplaced and counterproductive, I can't see that preserving the canon in its pre-Theory/Cultural Studies form is either possible or desirable. I have enough regard for most of the texts usually invoked as canonical that I think they will continue to attract readers without the need to place them in a pre-established heirarchy that only invites efforts to divest them of their privileged status, from whatever angle of skepticism or resentment.

Most of the efforts to "interrogate" the canon over the past two decades have not really questioned the need for heirarchy in organizing literary study. Indeed, the focus of much canon-busting has been on making room for other texts, sometimes on replacing existing canonical works with those deemed worthy for other than traditionally defined "literary" qualities. (In some cases, non-canonical works, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, were shown to have such qualities despite their previous neglect.) The canon was altered or reconceived, not abandoned. Canonization, it would seem, continues to be "socially useful," as Jenkyns explicitly puts it, while the idea of literature as something that mostly provides "shared references and resonances"--or at least should be made to do so--is further reinforced.

If all "great books" can do is allow us to resonate with one another, then I don't think finally abandoning the canon altogether would do much harm. It might do literature a great deal of good, if we can then more profitably think of reading it as a particular kind of experience the ultimate reward of which lies in the experience itself and can't be reduced to its political utility or its role in the academic curriculum. Jenkyns himself, in discussing the popularity of Jane Austen, convincingly maintains that literary works survive through a kind of bottom-up process whereby authors and books appeal over time through their "actual merits." This kind of informal canonization should be enough to keep the greatest books in circulation, while whatever "shared references" they also encourage are references that persist because they're really worth sharing.

Becoming Respectable

Jacob Russell wonders why so many writers are so eager to get their work published in "little magazines":

Each one of these periodicals receives hundreds, and many, thousands of submissions a month. Is it the hope of becoming "respectable," of making an honest buck, that drives writers to spend their time and money printing and copying and addressing and mailing and keeping records so you don't send the same story to the same place?

And answers his own question:

Aside from Harpers (which publishes no more than 12 stories a year) and The New Yorker (which may publish 100), what's left? Esquire. Playboy. Maybe a dozen open slots left in the Real World. What's left, the last remaining outlet for print publication: the Little Lits. So what drives this is the writers. When the readers disappear, what else is left?

The problem with this answer is that the readers didn't "disappear." They never existed. Little magazines have always subsisted on subscriptions from libraries and subsidies from universities or some other outside funding agency. Very few (perhaps none) have been able to keep themselves in print off of individual subscriptions and sales, and even those that do find themselves onto library shelves mostly go unread except by a few creative writing students who want to know what sort of thing a given journal is accepting these days.

The literary magazine as we know it was the product of two aspirations, one noble, one less so. Most of the early "little magazines" were created, at least in part, in a sincere effort to provide "serious writing" a place of initial publication in a world where the "book business" has little or no interest in literary short fiction or poetry. To some extent, such magazines continue to be founded on this idealistic ambition, although over the years it has become increasingly difficult to see how yet another literary magazine published from yet another small college or regional university is going to spark a revival of interest in poetry or the short story. The circulation numbers for most of these publications remain microscopically low.

The other function the little magazine came to fulfill was offering the opportunity for publishing credits to the scores of writers who began to emerge from the creative writing programs appearing in increasing numbers in the 1950s-1970s and that now exist in some form in almost all American colleges and universities. Since not all of these programs could insist that incoming faculty already have books to their credit, placement in one of these magazines could help insure job candidates appropriate credentials and could serve as measures of "production" for faculty members in mid-career. Take a look at the contributors page of most literary magazines, and you'll most likely discover that most of the contributors are either members of the faculty of a creative writing program or students at one of these programs, presumably in both cases seeking publication credit that will specifically advance their academic careers.

(I am a graduate of one of these programs, and I can certainly testify from my own experience that gathering such credits was something I was taught, both directly and indirectly, to vigorously pursue.)

I'm afraid that this more utilitarian goal has come to dominate most writer's thinking and largely accounts for what "drives" them to engage in the submissions game Jacob describes. Jacob further cautions against blaming "academics" for the dismal rules of this game. But it isn't the "MFA Mafia Cartel" that controls current little magazine publishing operations, even though graduates of the more prestigious MFA programs do seem to have pride of place in the more presigious literary magazines. (Just as scholars from more prestigious universities get pride of place in most scholarly publications of any kind.) It's the very attachment of little magazines to universities, from which most of today's little magazines still originate, and inevitably to the protocols of academic publication that most directly influences the dynamics of publishing in even the smallest, least recognizable of the literary magazines.

On the one hand, the existence of this system does help to keep poetry and short fiction alive as literary forms. This is not a negligible accomplishment, and for it the editors of little magazines, who endure a maximum amount of trouble and enjoy a minimum amount of compensation for their efforts, should be thanked. On the other hand, the bland uniformity of what is published in the little magazines as a whole begins to suggest that the publishing format created decades ago to serve the needs of "literature" as embodied in the institutional necessities of academe isn't aging well.

For a more extensive discussion of the role of literary magazines, see my essay here.

Life Stories

Selah Saterstrom's The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press) and Corrina Wycoff's O Street (OV Books) both depict young women whose experience is partially determined by the unpleasant circumstances in which they are raised. Both are notably honest in their portrayal of the external influences that limit their protagonists' opportunities, but also just as honest in their implicit acknowledgement of the bad choices each has made. But ultimately they are quite different kinds of books both formally and stylistically, and, although I enjoyed reading both of them, that they are so dissimilar in method, only to stand finally as variations on a common theme and mode, seems to me their most noteworthy limitation as works of fiction.

The Meat and Spirit Plan presents us with the first-person narrative of the life of a young southern girl (unnamed) who floats through her school years in a kind of sexualized haze and ultimately winds up in a Scottish university studying in the "Postmodern Seminar for the Study of Interpretive Uses" in the religion department. There she continues to exist in a fog of misdirected energy and generalized excess, culminating in a debilitating illness that forces her to return to the United States. She recovers, and the final pages of the novel suggest she might finally be getting her life into some kind of order.

The narrator's alienation from her enervating surroundings, from the monotonous drift of her own life, is profound if not often explicitly acknowledged. It is, however, unmistakable in the affectless but cumulatively affecting chunks of prose that serially approximate the aimless, one-thing-after-another succession of experiences that make up the narrator's life. These prose pieces ultimately acquire a kind of poetic intensity of effect in their bleak circumscription of the character's experience, although they avoid self-consciously "poetic" devices:

In a motel room across from the bed I am in is another bed just like it. In in Stripper Stephanie is on top of some guy then the guy I am with pulls me out of the bed we are in. He pushes me in the bathroom, into the shower, and closes the door. Once inside the bathroom he realizes the light is off and he opens the door, turns it on, then closes the door again. I like the lights on, he says. Do it, he says. Do what, I say. It, he says. I do not know what he means. Do it, he says. Standing in the shower I make a face like I'm a girl in a horror movie.

Unfortunately, the novel's ultimate attempt to integrate the narrator's dislocated experiences into a more coherent account of a life gone wrong then recovered, which is ham-handedly reinforced by the explicit revelation that the novel we have just read has literally been written by the narrator as a capstone to that recovery, robs it of some of its accumulated force. It becomes just another version of a bildungsroman, an opportunity for its female author/protagonist to "express" herself and her newly-found sense of direction. What had been a fairly provocative portrayal of dissolution, of a young American woman giving in to her impulses on her picaresque journey into adulthood, becomes a rather conventional story of a young lady learning her lesson.

The conclusion to O Street is equally frustrating, but in this case it is not due to a weakening of poetic concentration but a kind of loss of narrative will. The book is a sequence of short stories focusing on the life of Beth Dinard, who at the beginning of the book is an adult literally returning to her hometown in New Jersey at the news of her mother's death but who appears in other stories at various stages in her life. In effect, we return with Beth to revisit her past, which is recounted in a series of discrete stories (some focusing on her mother as well). One could call the book a novel-in-stories of the kind that has become increasingly popular over the last decade or so.

Most of the stories are conventional slices-of-life revealing something essential about Beth's upbringing by a drug-addicted, borderline mentally ill mother, her attempts to cope with the miserable circumstances in which she is forced to live, her escape from those circumstances and subsequent efforts to establish some sense of normalcy for herself, etc. They are generally well done, most culminating in a moment of subtle illumination of the book's predominant themes--the search for security, the persistence of memory, leaving and being left, etc. Only one of the stories, the title story, attempts something different, and it's probably the best in the book. In it, Wycoff effectively uses second-person narration to evoke a former schoolmate of Beth's, who had abandonded the "O Street Girl" as a friend but years later is moved to call Beth on the phone to explain herself. It's a well-executed story in it own right, and it lends the book as a whole a refreshing change of approach and perspective.

Unfortunately the last two stories in the book bring it to an overly safe and predictable conclusion. The final story in particular, about the immediate aftermath of the death of Beth's mother, attempts to explicitly gather the book's otherwise implicit narrative strands but succeeds only in burdening it with too many passages of forced exposition and awkward reflection:

After she learned of her mother's death--as Beth walked block after block in the oppressively hot Chicago night air--she kept looking in ruts beside curbs, half expecting to see her glasses. Thirteen years ago, she'd fallen into disrepair when she'd thought her mother was dead. Would she do that again? She was thirty-five now, too old to lose everything a second time. She'd been at her job for ten years; she'd finally managed to move back to one of Chicago's more decent neighborhoods where an abundance of grocery stores stayed open all night, and maybe, soon, she would meet a woman to love.

The reader has to wade through too much of this sort of "summing up," and the effect is to make us feel that the author did not have enough confidence in her narrative strategy--whereby the parts add up to a whole without all connections being made overt--or in her readers' ability to assimilate that strategy so that she could in effect leave it to fend for itself. In the effort to create a novel-in-stories, Wycoff has put too much emphasis on the novelistic, with its more direct demand for coherence and closure, and not enough on the inherent capacity of her individual stories to carry the needed narrative weight.

Both of these books, then, are compelling up to a point, but at that point essentially retreat into overly familiar exercises in composing a "life story." For me, fiction has to be more than an opportunity to recount one's experience with some literary license allowed, even if that experience is rooted in difficult or colorful or unfamiliar circumstances. It has to find an aesthetic strategy that elevates the "story"--which too often is just the same old story novelists have been telling for years, if not centuries--beyond mere narrative facility through formal ingenuity and/or stylistic resourcefulness. Each of these books demonstrates admirable facility--and Saterstrom shows real skill as a stylist--but each of them pulls up short of the necessary aesthetic inspiration.

For a more enthusiastic review of The Meat and Spirit Plan, see this one by Scott Bryan Wilson in the new Quarterly Conversation.

Style and Depth

B. R. Myers's critique of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke essentially amounts to these two complaints: a) Johnson is not a psychological realist, and b) there are passages in the book that Myers doesn't like. To my mind, neither of these points is relevant to an honest assessment of Johnson's novel, and thus Myers's "review" should be read (as the Rake also points out) as another installment in his "manifesto" against contemporary fiction and its readers and should not be confused with actual criticism of Tree of Smoke.

In his admitted ignorance of Johnson's other fiction, Myers finds it a crippling flaw that this latest novel does not "depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives." Myers warns potential readers of Tree of Smoke: "Anyone expecting a psychological novel from characters so lacking in complexity deserves to be disappointed."

But what if, in fact familiar with Johnson's other books, we don't expect this latest one to be a "psychological novel"? What if we have concluded that Johnson's strengths as a writer don't lie in detailing the "extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives" of his characters? And what if this is so because Johnson so often portrays characters who lack an ability to reflect much on their actions, whose lives seem propelled by forces they don't control or who get caught up in events they can't foresee? What if in taking up a Denis Johnson novel we just don't think Tolstoy is a particularly apt touchstone in beginning to evaluate it?

Further, what if we think the very concept of "psychological realism" is specious to begin with? Myers thinks that the mark of a good novel is "style and depth" and that it's the psychologizing that brings the "depth." A "psychological novel" is one in which the novelist descends into the murk of human consciousness and brings up nuggets of clarity and enlightenment. Exactly what it is that makes a novelist a sufficiently expert analyst of the human mind that I would care what he/she comes up with in this dive into the depths, or that qualifies some passages of discontinuous prose or halting exposition as "psychology," has never been adequately explained to me. Pretending to mirror the ongoing operations of consciousness (or to translate those operations into coherent language) is just another way of getting words onto the page, and by now it's a dull and overused strategy. It has no special merit that entails an inherent superiority to other ways of writing.

For me, that Denis Johnson is not a psychological novelist is one of the primary reasons I would want to read his fiction in the first place.

And then there are Johnson's putative lapses in style. I'm prepared to believe that in a book as long as Tree of Smoke there will be some sluggish moments, some stylistic treading of water, or even that in this particular novel Johnson's subject has not called out the best in his prose style. However, I can't rely on Myers's analysis in order to entertain these possibilities, mainly because he doesn't provide any analysis. Most of the examples of bad writing he cites are condemned for their lack of psychological astuteness--surely a colonel would never use an "artsy compound adjective thrown in with profanity and genteelisms"--for trivial "mistakes" in word choice--apparently one must never use the word “bric-a-brac” if Vietnamese villagers are in the vicinity--for insufficent knowledge of physics--"Could someone standing in such a noisy place hear even his heartbeat, let alone his pulse?"--or an overreliance on "startling word combinations"--one's pulse shouldn't "snicker" and one's sweat shouldn't "creak--but rarely are they examined in any detail or with much insight. Frankly, many of the passages Myers cites seem ok to me. But because I don't share Myers's assumptions about how a novelist's words "should mean something," I guess I'm just one of those who "contribute to the rot" of the King's English.

Certainly Myers does almost nothing to demonstrate that Johnson's prose style actually is deficient, aside from quoting a number of passages and making some irritated remarks about them. He assumes we will agree with him that the passages are indeed bad, but I don't, or at least I want some close reading of them that points out their particular flaws. Instead I get this, about one extended sample of "bad prose":

It is not always easy to tell whether Johnson is being serious or merely unfunny, but I sense no irony here. Rather than disdain Edward’s puerile humor and self-importance, we are to share his condescension toward a society that would never “get” his lampoon, which, by the way, has little chance of being off-color with an “unmountable” lead (another case of Johnson canceling out his own words). We are also to accept that although Edward is now the kind of man who lets puppies starve to death, and is something of a sociopath to boot, his experiences afford him unique insight into Philippine society. In a mad world only the madmen are sane, and all that. . . .

Note that what is supposed to be an example of bad prose turns out to be a criticism of one character's "puerile humor and self-importance" and of the notion that "in a mad world only the madmen are sane," etc. Nothing in Myers's commentary is an examination of style. Perhaps he tells me that I might not like this particular character or that the underlying theme is banal (both a matter of individual judgment of course, each requiring a separate critical argument), but he tells me nothing about Denis Johnson as a stylist. In fact, there is nothing in Myer's review that suggests to me that he knows anything at all about what makes for an effective prose style, nor that he read Tree of Smoke in order to fairly appraise it for what it is trying to accomplish rather than find in it what he wanted to find--an excuse to engage in more splenetic denunciation of contemporary fiction.

Myers's review serves to remind us that he doesn't much care for contemporary fiction. (Although, having read A Reader's Manifesto as well as several of his subsequent reviews, I still don't really know why.) I'm not sure, however why the Atlantic Monthly's book editor otherwise thought it was something worth publishing. As a piece of literary criticism, it's pretty wretched.