The Reading Experience

Pangloss as Literary Critic

It might indeed be the case that many "negative" reviews of fiction are glib and opportunistic exercises in what has come to be called snark. Such reviews make little real effort to adequately describe the ambitions and strategies of the book under review, or to assess the book's success or relative failure to fulfill these ambitions with any degree of specificity. If this sort of review were to disappear, neither literature nor literary criticism would register the loss.

But to dismiss all critical evaluation that reaches unfavorable conclusions as illegitimate, somehow an affront to the "community" of writers and readers who value books at a time when reading seems endangered, is not just irrational but in fact a greater danger to sustaining a serious literary culture than indiscriminate snark would ever be. That some reviews elevate shallow and superficial pronouncements over considered judgment does not mean negative reviews that are carefully considered should be equally rejected. Moreover, writers themselves should welcome the latter sort of review, since it signifies the work has been taken seriously and given close attention. This seems to me an infinitely preferable response than empty praise, which, in the absence of the more rigorous standards implied by the possibility of a negative judgment, is all that reflexive approval is destined to become.

I wouldn't necessarily use the word "smarm" to identify this kind of praise, although anyone who writes book reviews simply to uncritically celebrate otherwise mediocre writers because all writers need "support" is hard to take seriously. Especially when the reviewer is him/herself also primarily a fiction writer, readers are well-justified to think that such reviews are a form of self-protection at the least, but even when they are sincerely intended, more often than not the lack of real critical engagement with the book under review undermines credibility. Synopsis substitutes for analysis, and judgment is replaced with rhetorical flash and vacuous accolades. Indeed, this sort of rah-rah reviewing is so common, so much dominates the discourse of book reviewing at the moment, that it's always surprising to me when someone suggests there are too many negative reviews around in the first place. 

The advice often given to reviewers and critics who might have something actually critical to say about a book or a writer is to just say nothing instead, to let one's silence stand as sufficient commentary. In long-form criticism, this makes some sense; extended consideration of the flaws in a particular work or a writer's body of work is not usually as worthwhile a use of critical space as the explication of the most accomplished works and admired writers. (Although dissenting evaluations of established writers that question their critical standing certainly have their place.) However, contemporaneous book reviews serve a different purpose. The best reviews do not facilitate "consumer choice" or "cultural discussion" (although some reviews might inadvertently do these things) but take on the responsibility of providing an initial critical reaction to books that presumably seek an audience not just among those who happen to read this week's newspaper, and not just among readers this month or this year, but also future readers for whom the book's literary merit has become the most important consideration, not its purely occasional interest as a "new book" or as an artifact arising from its circumstances of its publication (the review's circumstances of publication as well). In some cases, those reviews provide the only available critical guidance to such readers, but even if additional, more extended criticism has subsequently appeared, often the presuppositions at work were introduced by the initial responses to the book or writer found in reviews.

This was certainly my experience as a fledgling scholar of contemporary literature, when I was trying to round up the critical responses to writers in whose work I had an interest. Of course, most contemporary fiction has yet to accumulate the kind of formal criticism associated with more canonical literature, but I would always look first at the reviews, and usually found they had in one way or another (in rendering both positive and negative judgments) established the context in which the writer's work continued to be discussed, the most thoughtful and conscientious reviews often enough still providing valuable insights into that work. Had I been surveying reviews motivated by the perceived need to reinforce a literary "community" against attack rather than to reinforce literature itself through honest and detailed literary criticism, even in the modest form of the book review, I would most likely have found little of value and concluded that such a "literary" culture doesn't really take literature very seriously.

Certainly no writer welcomes an unfavorable evaluation of his/her work. It's another thing altogether, however, to extend one's dissatisfaction with this sort of critical scrutiny to a general proscription of negative criticism in the name of fellow-feeling for one's putative colleagues. Not only does this reduce the creation of literary art to an exercise in group solidarity, but it's practically an invitation to writers encouraging them to do shoddy work. Since whatever I might write is going to be praised simply because I wrote it (lest I get discouraged), there's no particular reason for me to artistically challenge either myself or my potential readers. Even if I have mustered up some ambition and taken risks, if the result is met with the same bland acceptance as all the less adventurous books, what motivation do I have to maintain my ambition? And if it is met with the silence that is supposed to be an adequate sign of disapproval, what reason would I have to consider this as anything other than cowardly?

On James Purdy

An excerpt from "The Art of Disturbance: On the Novels of James Purdy," available here.

When James Purdy died in 2009 at the age of 94, most people who still recognized his name surely judged that he had long outlived whatever relevance he and his books might once have had. Although he published almost 30 books, according to the James Purdy Society website only 9 of them remained in print, and these did not include the novels that won Purdy his once-estimable reputation, among them  Malcolm, The Nephew, and  Cabot Wright Begins. That these books were at the time of his death apparently not valued highly enough by publishers to make them available to readers seems compelling evidence either that the American cultural memory cannot sustain a writer lacking at least one “big” book, or that Purdy’s work doesn’t deserve continued recognition.

While the first explanation is unfortunately probably true enough, it doesn’t satisfactorily account for the neglect of James Purdy, whose novels during the 1960s, at least, were reviewed by prominent critics and remain sufficiently provocative in subject and theme that readers might still find them controversial—as did some contemporaneous reviewers who dismissed them as sensational or even immoral. As to the second explanation, no one who has been intrigued to read deeply into Purdy’s singularly disturbing stories and novels would be able to say this work might just as well be forgotten. However, after reading more of Purdy’s fiction, we can perhaps begin to understand why it was never entirely welcomed by the critical gatekeepers—popular and academic—who by default keep a writer’s reputation alive in book reviews and scholarly journals and on course syllabi, and why it was never likely to appeal to a large audience. At the same time, we can also begin to recognize that the very qualities of Purdy’s work that might explain its failure to maintain greater cultural visibility are also the qualities that make his work so remarkable—and that should win it a future audience.

Although in some ways Purdy was altogether attuned to the literary spirit of his time, especially in the 1950s and 60s, he gradually and increasingly became much less so. However, the way in which he remained true to his vision, style, and assumptions makes his fiction that much more valuable to future readers. Looking at Purdy’s most representative books shows why Purdy’s fiction was at first difficult simply to ignore but increasingly was ignored, in part, no doubt, because Purdy was ultimately a prolific writer, but also because Purdy did consistently adhere to core stylistic and formal assumptions and explore recurring themes. If readers and critics (particularly the latter) found this a convenient excuse to dismiss Purdy’s books, especially the later ones, as repetitive, the underlying resistance to Purdy’s work, I would argue, is a resistance not so much to repetition as to the challenge his fiction poses to passive or inattentive reading. On the one hand, it is as devoted to telling the truth about human existence as any body of work by an American writer, while on the other it relentlessly questions fiction’s capacity to reveal that truth. Further, Purdy’s fiction can seem straightforward and transparent, quite immediate in its visceral power, while at the same time frequently working quite subtly and indirectly, which an inattentive reader can miss. These are not the only challenges Purdy’s work presents, but in my opinion they most immediately explain its gradual loss of favor.

Purdy’s alienation from the dominant literary culture as represented by both publishers and reviewers ultimately became quite profound, prompted, no doubt, by his acknowledgment of the perceived irrelevance of his books, although publishers had demonstrated indifference, if not outright hostility, to his earliest fiction as well. (His first important work,  63: Dream Palace, was published in Great Britain after it could find no publisher in the United States.) Yet it is also the case that Purdy did very little on his part to ameliorate the situation. He gave few friendly interviews, did not participate in any efforts to better “position” his work in the literary marketplace, and above all never tried to write differently in order to make his fiction more amenable to conventional expectations of “literary fiction.” For readers, journalists, or critics who are more interested in writers than writing, more concerned about business than literature, Purdy’s attitude might have understandably been frustrating. Similarly, some readers and critics might rightly have found Purdy’s fiction stubbornly idiosyncratic, but dismissing it as idiosyncratic before determining if those idiosyncrasies actually amount to a sustained artistic vision hardly seems a very serious response.

Indeed, those of us who have read deeply into Purdy’s fiction quickly enough realize that what could be called its idiosyncrasies are in fact its greatest strengths and that Purdy didn’t merely write one or two individually adventurous, original stories or novels but instead created a comprehensively original body of work, each separate work providing a variation on Purdy’s themes and methods but also exemplifying his larger achievement. Purdy wrote few, if any, really weak books, and so almost all of them are equally good introductions to his work. In many ways, a reader who first approaches Purdy through one of his last novels will encounter the same Purdy one will find in his earliest novels, but an uninitiated reader might still want to start at the beginning to best see how he develops his distinctive fictional world. The terms and contours of that world are in fact remarkably apparent in Purdy’s first extended work of fiction, the novella 63: Dream Palace.