August 21, 2003
The First Rule of Snark Club
Laura Miller’s pan of Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary is up at Salon, and the book blogs have pointed to it as a confirmation of Heidi Julavits' claim that book reviewing has turned into a kind of bambi hunt for the snarky set.
Laura doesn’t like Diary, and she doesn’t like Chuck Palahniuk. She attacks the author’s prose, his character development, his plotting. She spends a while criticizing his descriptive style (“when was the last time you saw wine the color of Tang”), his ignorance of wealthy people’s habits of dress (“No fashionable woman would be caught dead in a Bob Mackie original.) and his research (“the kind of ‘research’ that can be achieved by leafing through a trade magazine for 30 minutes and is riddled with grating errors.”) Riled up, she moves on to the author’s fans: those “strangely oversized fellows you sometimes get seated next to on airplanes or in bars…”(*) Then she brings out the big guns, and in the space of two parentheses manages to suggest that the author, his characters, and his readers, are incorrigible onanists, one and all.
The review, in short, is the critical equivalent of dismissing something by pantomiming jerking off with one hand. It’s not quite wit, but it’s a shorthand for it, and it’s easy to write.
There’s nothing wrong with a good rant now and then, but if you must eviscerate an author, please bring it. Be funny, be clever, be like Cintra Wilson. And if you are going to complain about an author’s metaphors, for God’s sake mind your own prose. Midway through the article Laura presents this definition of good writing:
“A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root, as well as the forest.”
You don’t need to be snarky to identify that as a fantastically bad sentence. What Laura is telling you is that a great novelist sees the forest for the trees, and vice versa. This is as striking an example of the free exchange between dumb ideas and cliché as you could hope to find. That Miller would use such a hackneyed sentence to define what great novelists do right should alert the thinking reader that she has either let her rant get the best of her, or that she has no idea what the fuck she is talking about.
But just because she doesn’t know what she is talking about doesn’t mean that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. There’s another more cynical level to this kind of attack. Laura Miller can go after Chuck Palahniuk because Chuck Palahniuk is not part of the same literary world as she is--he is a popular writer. He used to be a cult writer, but his books have crossed over. And because Chuck is popular, a broadside against him will bring people who don’t hate his books--myself among them-- to the critique, where we we’ll all click around and ooh and aah and get upset and, presumably, sign up for Salon Premium Services or -- more likely-- ignore an ad for Sprint PCS and rack up the page-views of a new-media dinosaur. People will write about it on their weblogs and link to it and Salon will check their server logs and determine that the article was worth publishing because the traffic went up. It’s the same kind of reverse sycophantism that tabloids go for. But aside from launching ads that we have learned to ignore, what is the purpose of this kind of review? Does it mean anything?
The irony of the book world is that everybody writes about it, but hardly anyone pays attention to it. Most Americans will read less than five books this year, (many of which will be written by right wing talk-show hosts) and literate book reviews, even glowing ones, won’t have much of an effect of consumer sales. Reviews have some influence on the people who make decisions about what books appear where in a bookstore, but for the most part, book sales are a result of national television hits, blurbs in magazines, half-baked marketing plans, and word of mouth. For all the piss and vinegar, literary book reviews are the equivalent of academic papers about “otherness” from midwestern American Studies departments. They really don’t matter. They don’t have a cultural impact, and they don’t affect the economics of the business.
So knowing this, what should we expect from a book reviewer? I think Heidi’s right -- we should expect them to engage the book. And considering how few books we are reading to begin with, it might be better for them to spend less time attacking earnest writers and more time explaining to us exactly why a book is worth seeking out.
It should be clear by now that I like Chuck Palahniuk. I know. I know. I’m a poseur. It’s just that I’m not always interested in reading about hermaphroditic Ukrainians with charmingly mangled accents stuck on life-rafts with tigers or whatever it is they’re selling these days. Sometimes I want something a bit twisted. I like the fact that there is a place for books that fantasize about turning rendered human fat into soap; about lullabies that kill babies; about erratic narrators whose grasp of fashion is spotty; about oddly oversized loners who live in messy apartments and make miniature dollhouses -- books that are sloppy and creepy and a little bit alive.
Chuck Palahniuk knows how to describe a particular American weirdness that anyone who has worked at a Denny’s or cleaned a public bathroom will relate to. And the anger in his books (which, incidentally, is always part of the narrator, not the author) will be familiar to anyone who has ever stood outside of a beautiful house and wished pestilence on its occupants. Chuck Palahniuk is tapping into the same weird American dreams that you find in Chick Publications, the Left Behind Series, Art Bell broadcasts, rap metal band concert parking lots, and airport pornography. The writing might not be refined, but it is unique, and it is certainly not as bad as Laura would have you believe. And to have managed to build a career writing this kind of prose, without the benefit of an Iowa writer’s workshop and a story in the New Yorker debut fiction issue is all the more reason to like him.
And there’s another reason to like Chuck Palahniuk. He’s gleefully boosterish about what he likes. I suspect that most professional critics don’t really enjoy books, the same way most porn stars don’t really enjoy sex. * Day after day, fucking or getting fucked by the newest twenty something hipster with a coke problem or an advanced degree Victorian literature -- it must be tedious. But Chuck actually seems to get a kick out of things. He has an audio blog where he leaves messages for his fans, and recently he reviewed a book called the Contortionist's Handbook there. Listen to it. (it’s short) How often do you hear an author actually say something like that?
This unreconstructed glee is exactly the opposite of what it means to review a book anymore. In places like Salon, cultural journalists try and write snappy and timely pieces about books that will generate clicks; it’s the same strategy MSNBC uses to lure singles into reading their dating ads. Meanwhile, at the New York Times, the book review editors sic under-published writers on recently published authors like hungry pit bulls. (Laura Miller, incidentally, is a co-author of the forthcoming “Harry Potter Goes to Hollywood.”) And since nobody is buying books anyway (really, they aren’t, I have this on some authority) it all ends up seeming silly and catty and stupid. Which is what we read books to get away from in the first place.
I don’t know what it is that makes a great novelist, but I suspect it has less to do with identifying the root and leaf structures of the forest, and more to do with a creative sort of guilelessness – an amusement with what the world is selling and a willingness to engage with it through writing. I wasn’t planning to read Diary, but I will now, if only to register a bit of protest to this review. I would encourage you to do the same. And if this makes me a Believer, so be it. The book is what matters, not the book people.
* Since were parsing prose here, what does that mean, “strangely oversized?” Does she mean Simpsons comic-book-guy fat? But what’s strange about that? Does she mean muscular and creepy like Henry Rollins? Oversized like a Prada bag (are those oversized?) See how much fun this is? Writing doesn’t work. Joy!
* Ok that’s a cliché too, but it’s a little less cliché than that forest from the trees bullshit.
