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Summary: A helpful critique of bad books
Review: After trying to read Don DeLillo's 'Underworld,' I felt like a failure. I knew the book was supposed to be brilliant, but I couldn't get through a single paragraph without getting confused or annoyed. Was it me? How could a highly-praised book be so bad?BR Myers takes DeLillo to task in the second chapter of 'A Reader's Manifesto.' Using plenty of quotes --- including passages that other critics have singled out for praise --- Myers shows that the emperor has no clothes. For some reason, many people in the critical establishment like over-written and needlessly abstract novels. All of BR Myers' book is as good as the DeLillo chapter. My only complaint is that it's too short. Myers even spends a few dozen pages responding to critics of the manifesto. But it turns out that the critics have willfully ignored what Myers is clearly saying --- bad writing does not deserve praise, and too many contemporary, prize-winning novelists write poorly. If you like reading novels and you feel pressure to plow through 'postmodern' books like 'Underworld,' you should read this manifesto first. You'll be glad you did.
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Summary: Like a Molotov cocktail aimed at the establishment
Review: B.R. Myers' critical analysis of the state of today's literary elite is a good reason to rejoice. Not only is he relentlessly entertaining (and far, far more well-read than seemingly any of the authors or critics he points a magnifying glass to are), but he gets he point down in less than two hundred short pages. Myers exposes the formular behind today's most praised authors, like Cormac McCarthy and Anne Proulx (e.g. endless repetition only done to inflate the size of their books) and dissects the motives of newspaper literary critics, who are quickly becoming extinct (and for good reason). Strangely, even authors that don't abide by Myers' ironic "10 Rules for Serious Writers", like T.C. Boyle, seem incapable of leveling harsh criticism on "accepted" writers.
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Summary: This book will save you time and money
Review: Book reviewers, bookstores, online bookstores, book clubs rave over dozens of new books each year. Yet rarely do they ever really tell the truth. Why? Because they want you to buy a product before you know what it really is. Think about it: how many times have you bought a book someone has recommended and been disappointed?
Myers tells you which writers to steer clear of. Unfortunately it doesn't tell you much about writers to seek out. Following Myers's principles, I will recommend a few from my own shelves.
1. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Capote's non-fiction novel is the best thing he ever wrote and is a model of great narrative. No American writer today can touch him.
2. Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow. Doctorow tells his story using, in part, real-life characters. It is irresistable. Time magazine called it one of the 10 best novels of the 1970s, and they were right.
3. Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann. Don't laugh. Susann wrote direct, clear-eyed prose about the hell show business is on women. And what a great story. As the Salon Guide to Contemporary Literature rightly observes, she has had many imitators but no equals in this genre. Excellent.
4. Tales of the Unexpected, by Roald Dahl. Dahl writes unforgettable short stories. They stick in your mind because they are so damn good and exciting to read.
5. The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter. What love feels like: the joy, the jealousy, the mystery, the secrets. What does it all mean? Baxter gives us hints in these always exciting, often erotic stories.
I could go on, but these give you an insight into what Myers's is onto. Great popular writers can be damn good, literary-wise. Do a little exploring and you will find this to be absolutely true.
Bravo to Mr. Myers for telling us the truth: most contemporary "literary" fiction is just pretentious. His book is wonderful. Look for gems like the ones I've mentioned above and you will enjoy reading again.
R.L.
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Summary: A Guilty Pleasure
Review: For many of us this book is a guilty pleasure; Myers tells us what we have known all along, that many of the most critically acclaimed contemporary writers quite simply can't write. He spends some time discussing the history of literary fiction and exploring the inbred problems of today's self-serving world of literary criticism. But the strength of this book is its use of real examples of bad writing instead of delving into theoretical discussions of literature in general. Myers shows how contemporary writers use verbal gimmicks to trick the reader into ignoring the lack of structure, meaning, and substance in their work. The book does a good job in running the gamut of the literary parlor tricks of the day, from Proulx's pyrotechnics to Guterson's verbal valium. The common bond of contemporary literary fiction is not a certain type of style but a certain lack of substance.
The book covers enough material that even those who find themselves in firm agreement with Meyer's assessments can find some points of disagreement. For instance, Meyers has a curious aversion to the literary technique I call reiteration, where a description of something is immediately followed by a slightly different description of the same thing. When used properly this technique produces an image or idea in great detail without sacrificing a concise lyrical style. However, most of the samples of this style provided by Myers are examples of poor writing (it is Auster after all).
The book was both engaging and entertaining enough to finish in one evening; thoughtful enough for multiple re-readings. It is well written, well paced, and has a good balance of criticism and humor. I highly recommend it, especially to college students (as a professorial antidote) and to anyone contemplating trudging through any "great books" lists. I give it a solid A.
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Summary: Myers calls them as he reads them
Review: Have you ever read an award-winning work of recent fiction, only to wonder why it has received so much praise? Well, to quote Robin Williams' character in "Good Will Hunting," it's not your fault. Myers' book is a well-balanced and concise work, less than 150 pages (including endnotes and bibliography), but it packs a powerful impact. He focuses his well-documented attack on pretentious modern literature with specific stylistic criticism of five contemporary American authors, award-winning writers snugly ensconced in today's literary Hall of Fame. The excerpts he employs to demonstrate bad writing are as illustrative as they are painful to read, and there is scarcely a sensible reader out there who wouldn't agree with Myers' complaints. In many places, Myers contends that the amateur book reviewer on Amazon.com (that's us) knows more about good reading than the high-minded critic in New York. He ends the book with a fair response to his many critics and enemies, along with a sarcastic set of "rules" any aspiring writer of "serious" fiction ought to adhere to. In short, I am glad to have discovered this book, as it affirms many of my reactions to today's awful, yet acclaimed, writing. If you've ever been puzzled by the positive hype surrounding a terrible book, read this manifesto and discover that you are not alone.
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Summary: It isn't "Buy my opinion as yours".
Review: I devoured Mr. Meyer's book in a little under 2 hours. I returned, then, and reread the book more slowly. It seems that people either praise the essay highly, or call it hypocritical (or any other number of things). Some of these readers are obviously missing the point. Some of the most praised contemporary fiction out there is pretentious. There's little debating that. Whether an individual likes it or not is up to them. And *that* is Mr. Meyer's biggest lesson. The point is not to take his word and rebel against the mainstream critics' choices, but to make up your *own* mind! I did not agree with everything Mr. Meyer's had to say, but the crux of his arguement is true. People are no longer questioning form or device. They praise interesting turns of phrase and obscure metaphors - even if those very things make absolutely no sense. This essay exposes the sheer audacity of some authors. Character development and plot are things that "get in the way"? An absurd notion! Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who has ever wanted to tell their professor just why [insert book title here] was not worthy of the praise lavished on it. Mr. Meyer's succinctly puts what so many of us have always thought.
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Summary: Hot Air
Review: I think it is pretty hilarious that someone can spend so much effort attacking the vestige that is American Literature. Like those big culture mavens in the salons of the East Coast are really foisting anything on anybody. In a world where millions are made on diet books and the hagiographies of retired generals. But whatever. Like his apparent assumption that writing is "for" communicating clearly and elegantly (and that alone), Myers' frustration with the scant critical praise for genre fiction is either horribly naive or numbingly jaded. That is, some of us like sentences that announce themselves, consciousnesses that are as bold as (or bolder than) their ideas, language that is more allusive and mysterious than descriptive or metaphorical, and moreover, don't fault those who read for entertainment, information, or a moment so finely wrought that the words pass unnoticed. Many of Myers' frustrations I share--I don't know when I'll read DeLillo--but because of its philosophical presumptions about the manner and proper use of language, Myers' critique is ultimately the asinine braying of a know-it-all boor. He might as well have been writing about spelling.
I realize that for a lot of people--those who love genre fiction (and I am one), those who feel/are made to feel dumb in the presence of a difficult or mysterious book--this was a refreshing blast. He obviously cares a lot about books, which gives him a lot of leeway in my estimation, but he also obviously thinks he knows what books are for (clarity, description, honesty) and what they are not for (obscurity, confusion, uncertainty), and by my lights, that is just presumptuous blather. The current aesthetic is all over the map, in many places quite silly. But don't let's think that it has ever been or ever will be otherwise. Sheesh.
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Summary: Re: Mr. Quashie
Review: Mr Quashie, my email address is johnebert@mac.com
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Summary: Less about Andersen's emperor than Aesop's grapes
Review: Myers' argument is sloppy and hypocritcal at best. He lambasts Paul Auster for using the GOD/DOG pun, saying that it is sophmoric and pseudointellectual; however, he fails to mention that this same pun comes up at least once in Joyce's Ulsysses, a book for which he seems to have undying respect. Furthermore, some of his critiques of passages in modern literary fiction are just as vague and devoid of meaning as the praise he ridicules. He seems so caught up with trying to convince the reader that he is not, in fact, a philistine himself, that I cannot help but doubt his devotion to Proust and Joyce, both of whom he mentions warmly. As a matter of fact, these two writers are the preeminate masters of literary prestension, and he fails to notice this. Although Ulysses is perhaps my favorite book, I am the first to admit that Finnegans Wake is, for the most part, unreadable, and I only know one person who has actually read Proust's enormous opus in its entirety. His argument, if we can really call it that, is laced with many inconsistencies like these. Judging by some of the other reviews on this site, "A Reader's Manifesto" appeals mainly to people who have not actually read the books in question. This book reeks of the scent of a frustrated writer's sour grapes. We will never see a novel written by B.R. Meyers, and he knows it.
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Summary: Superior
Review: One of the first reviews I ever wrote on Amazon.com was for "The Art of Scandal : The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner" by Douglass Shand-Tucci. I'd read about it in the New York Review of Books and, encouraged by the author's having won literary awards (oh! if I only knew then what I know now!), was distressed to find it almost unreadable, replete with sentences like this: 'Though stimulated by her patronage - Gardner was one of the first to see Loeffler not only as a virtuoso but as the composer he wished to be and increasingly today is regarded as - Loeffler grew to feel at one point distinctly imposed upon by Gardner, who seemed to him possessive and only too willing to "show him off" in Ralph Locke's words, as "a kind of in-house virtuoso" in the Gardner music room, all of this, or (sic) course, quite classic behavior on the part of humble but artful, trustworthy but vain, kind but cruel and rampagingly dominant Isabella!' Yikes, I thought, somebody messed up. Perhaps the editor forgot to edit and the reviewer forgot to read? Several weeks later I heard an interview with the author on NPR and listened intently, waiting for someone to ask the author about this horrid, florid style, and was shocked that neither correspondent nor callers ever mentioned it! Since that episode I've saved the reviews for books I intend to read so I can compare my reading experience with that of critical reviewers, and I have been shocked (shocked!) at the disrelation -- not just once but many times. Enter B.R. Myers, who takes on the literary establishment with this delightful, accessible and pithy critique, starting with a preface about the work's beginning as an Atlantic Monthly article, continuing with chapters devoted to critical darlings Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, David Guterson, Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy, and ending with an epilogue on the response of critics to his reproaches, a humorous set of rules for the Serious Writer, copious endnotes and a bibliography. Myers states his premise early on -- "some of the most acclaimed contemporary prose is the product of mediocre writers availing themselves of trendy stylistic gimmicks" -- then goes on to cite passages used as examples of brilliance by critics, analyzing their many flaws by calling attention to unimaginative content, repetitive phrasing, tedious structure and glacial pacing; he contrasts these excerpts with selections by Woolf, Nabokov and Balzac, among others. Perhaps even more scathing are his strikes against literary critics (contrasted several times with the common folk at Amazon.com) who not only praise style over substance, but who lavish praise without explanation, dismiss as philistine anyone who doesn't agree with them, and look down their noses at genre fiction -- the current refuge of story and character in American literature. Most telling is the epilogue, where Myers shows how prickly critics use straw-man arguments and ad hominem attacks to dismiss his position. I've always been an eclectic reader, finding satisfaction and insight in the classics, genre fiction and nonfiction. But I throw my hands up in despair at the tripe that passes for literature with a capital 'L' these days and, when so many readers have access to almost any book imaginable, I'm angry at the editors, publishers and critics who have enabled this descent into unreadable exercises in style. Talk about codependent relationships! I'll take James Michener and Jane Austen over David Mamet or Don DeLillo any day of the week, any week of the year. Myers uses clear writing (imagine!) and lots of examples to show that, indeed, you are not crazy! The garbage critics have been telling you is genius is really just .... garbage. I think there are fine contemporary writers out there -- Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, Christopher Buckley come quickly to mind -- authors who recognize that style services, rather than obviates, plot and character. But somewhere in the 20th century the arts got hijacked by an elitist group that thinks anything that can be understood by the hoi polloi must not qualify as art; that any painting or novel that is popular must be dismissed; that style triumphs over substance and that obscurity and novelty pass for style. I don't know how to defeat hateful, boorish snobbery, but I think that the great unwashed masses sharing opinions in forums like Amazon.com is a great way to begin. Bless you, Mr. Myers, for taking on this naked emperor. Perhaps you might tackle the art and music world next?
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