B.R. Myers: The Bottom of the Pecking Order

B.R. Myers is the poor man’s Dale Peck, and by “poor,” I mean “intellectually impoverished.” As frequent readers of this blog will recall, I was no fan of Peck’s Hatchet Jobs when I read it last spring, but now, in comparing it with Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, I feel I may have shortchanged the ax man. While Hatchet Jobs courted controversy with all the subtlety the title implies, relying on theses better suited to hostile tweets (“Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation”) than to substantive essays, and frequently resorting to aggressive non-sequiturs (“with friends like this, literature needs an enema”) in the absence of any subtler wit, Peck was remarkably successful in one area where many writers fail: creating an unforgettable character – in his case, the character of Dale Peck, book critic. As bizarre as it may sound, Hatchet Jobs was at least partly written in a spirit of generosity. Peck was willing to overstate his points, to play the fool – to be “clownish,” in his words – in order to get a passionate conversation about current books started. B.R. Myers, on the other hand, thinks the literary conversation should have ended for all time sometime in the middle of the 20th century, and spends almost 150 pages saying so.

A Reader’s Manifesto is a worthless piece of garbage. But I’m willing to dignify it with a response because of the one value Mr. Myers and I do share: our desire to attack and publically humiliate the writers who piss us off.

A Reader’s Manifesto is divided into five major sections: “Evocative Prose,” “Edgy Prose,” “Muscular Prose,” “Spare Prose,” and “Generic Literary Prose.” (The beginning and end are heavily padded with a preface, introduction, conclusion, epilogue, and appendix, I guess to fill the book out to manuscript length.) These headings suggest that each section or essay will explore a specific problem Myers finds endemic to contemporary writing, defining his terms, citing examples by a range of authors, and, ideally, reaching toward some larger points about what this trend might mean.  But each essay might as well be named for the author it discusses, since each confines itself almost entirely to one: Annie Proulx ("Evocative"), Don DeLillo ("Edgy"), Cormac McCarthy ("Muscular"), Paul Auster ("Spare"), and David Guterson ("Generic") respectively.

It is the first of several tricky rhetorical moves that Myers makes. By confining each essay to a particular author’s body of work, Myers can generate a wealth of like examples for whatever “problem” he’s discussing.  Generally, unless a certain type of metaphor or elevated language really is a mistake (in the sense of being an anomalous authorial oversight) it will occur again and again in that author's short story, novel, or even career. To paraphrase an old saw, if you do it once, it’s an accident; but doing it over and over quickly becomes a style. A critic may judge a style to be aesthetically successful or unsuccessful and can advance an argument either way, of course.  But to be thorough, any such argument must offer more than an uncoordinated series of apparent grammatical corrections: it must address what patterns emerge, and what results from those patterns.

Myers, however, does no such thing. By claiming that each of his essays is about a “type” of prose, rather than the style of a particular author, Myers abdicates the critic's responsibility to establish any larger context other than isolated sentences.  He abdicates, in fact, the critic's obligation to address an author’s larger project, or even the form and structure of an entire book.

In other words, Myers is making the argument that sentences are inherently good or bad. He's saying that the way literary language communicates can be evaluated separately from what it's communicating. He’s saying that there are rules about the way sentences should work that apply regardless of the larger form or aesthetic of the fiction in question. I think this is the kind of idea with which one can easily disagree, because I consider it batshit crazy. Sentences, even sentences that don't make literal syntactical sense, are inherently neutral; their worth comes from the contribution they make to what Poe would call the work’s single overall effect.

I don’t mind that Myers disagrees with me about this: he's not alone. I do, however, object to the way he rules out any possibility of disagreement in his Introduction, writing, “We can all argue about whether a story is interesting or a character believable, but few literate people would deny that ‘a clash of sound, discordant,’ is repetitive, or that ‘from whence there could be no way back’ is absurdly archaic for a story set in the Truman years.” Myers here is trying to establish common ground by disguising evaluative assessments as objective ones. “A clash of sound, discordant” is (kinda sorta) repetitive, sure, but repetition can be used to great effect, as even Myers (kinda sorta) admits when he references Hemingway.  “From whence there could be no way back” is archaic, but to add “absurdly” is to make a value judgment in no way justified by the excerpted text. (And even describing something as “absurd” is not necessarily a criticism.)

What’s even batshittier is the fact that, when Myers observes a particular writer’s style displays impressive internal consistency, or when a work's style appears connected to its themes, or both, he takes this as a sign that the book is even sloppier than he realized at first. About Proulx, he writes, “[Her] wordplay virtually never lets up; it is hard to find three consecutive sentences in which she isn’t trying to startle or impress the reader.” He describes Don DeLillo’s writing in White Noise – a book largely set in grocery stores and concerned with the disposable products of consumer culture – as a “lazy shopping list” and points out its pop cultural references have “dated like an open box of cereal.” (Bet DeLillo cried himself to sleep after reading that.) Of Cormac McCarthy, he writes, “The novel is a fundamentally irreverent form: it tolerates epic language only when used with a selective touch.  To record with the same majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife-fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch.” And so on. Although Myers turns his critical eye on individual sentences only, what actually bothers him the most is their purposefully achieved cumulative effect – an effect that overwhelms him, disturbs him, lingers in his mind, even though he doesn’t like it. To me, that’s the surest sign that these authors are doing something right.

Public Enemy Number One, pt. 1

I want to be rich and I want lots of money / I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny / I want lots of clothes and fuckloads of diamonds / I hear people die while trying to find them / And I'll take my clothes off and it will be shameless / 'Cause everyone knows that's how you get famous... / I don't know what's right and what's real / Anymore...

- Lily Allen, "The Fear"

This is part of a series about James Frey—
Introduction (why this guy?), Part 2 (on his recent novel), Part 3 (on the fiction factory)

James Frey is not personally responsible for the excesses of contemporary literary culture, but in his work and his career, he has come to stand, for me, as a symbol of all those excesses taken to their worst extreme. Everyone knows that James Frey is a liar -- that's a statement of fact, not a value judgment.  He's lied in print, on television, and on the radio.  But lots of people lie for all kinds of reasons, and the simple fact that someone lied does not, in my opinion, make that person permanently contemptible.  The reason that James Frey is permanently contemptible is because he's also a hypocrite.  When he calls himself a writer, an artist, he is not affirming a commitment to truth and beauty, a commitment that at times comes at great personal cost.  He is offering an alibi for actions that are clearly, nakedly motivated by a desire for money and fame.  Someday, when sentient robots inspect the dross of our ridiculous civilization for clues as to what, exactly, went so terribly awry, they will come across the moldering archive of Frey's contributions to the world of letters, and those robots will weep until their face plates are streaked with rust.

Who is James Frey, anyway?  He's most famous as the guy whose addiction memoir, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, a runaway bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection in which he referred to himself as a Criminal with a capital C, turned out to be heavily fictionalized, despite the author's public assertions that the book was accurate and had even been fact-checked by Doubleday, his publisher (which, obviously, it never was).  Despite the subsequent media storm and an avalanche of hate mail, Frey kept writing, eventually publishing the novel BRIGHT SHINY MORNING with HarperCollins in 2008.  His most recent project is Full Fathom Five, a young adult book packaging company.

To keep this post manageable, I'm going to divide it up into three chunks: the first about Frey's memoir, the next on his novel, and the last on his book packaging company.

On the Memoir

I haven't read A MILLION LITTLE PIECES cover to cover, and the scandal surrounding it has been discussed to death elsewhere, so I'll do my best to keep this short.  But I do think the debate over this book provides a good illustration of the kind of "controversy" Frey has courted over his career. 

Because the thing is, in my opinion, there should be no controversy, at least not literary controversy.  What happened with A MILLION LITTLE PIECES had nothing to do with art and everything to do with money.  Frey was financially motivated to publish the book as memoir, not as a novel, and then, when the factual inaccuracy was discovered, he claimed to be an artist fighting the good fight.  The fact that anybody listened to him, that anybody took him seriously, says to me that our national debates about literature have degenerated to the point of total incomprehensibility.  In the 1950's, Americans asked more of their game shows than we do of the literary world today.

Consider this: according to an article on Frey in the Guardian, Frey's agent submitted A MILLION LITTLE PIECES to seventeen New York publishers as a novel, and all of them rejected it, including Doubleday.  Only when it was resubmitted as a memoir did Doubleday make an offer.  The words in the book were the same, but the categorization was different.  So what exactly did James Frey think was going on?  If he believed the accuracy of the book didn't matter, why did he think they changed their minds?

I would argue that there are two basic modes of reading.  One is to read for aesthetic pleasure, and the other is to read for information.  The concept of the "found poem," or of appropriated text in fictive works by postmodern authors like Donald Barthelme, hinges on this division of reading modes.  With a found poem, readers approach text that was intended to be read as information -- instructions in a grammar book, poorly translated warning signs around a swimming pool -- in an aesthetic mode.  And of course, approaching a book in a search for information can grant value to aesthetically questionable material.  Everyone's familiar with the old saw, "Truth is stranger than fiction"; we say that because we allow nonfiction writers liberties that we wouldn't give their fiction-writing counterparts.  Coincidences, freak accidents, out-there statistics might seem "unbelievable," but we believe them anyway if we're given to understand they've been verified.  What frequently makes nonfiction interesting is the very thing that makes fiction uninteresting: it seems implausible, farfetched, too perfect -- like someone made it up.

Fiction sometimes contains kernels (or more) of information -- historical details, geography, the nuts and bolts of a character's profession -- and nonfiction can offer aesthetic pleasures, too.  Naturally, the reader often switches back and forth over the course of the book, sometimes enjoying a well-crafted turn of phrase, sometimes learning a new fact.  But for a book to "work," it doesn't have to provide an equally valuable experience to readers in both modes.  For example, I would strongly advise against reading CHRONIC CITY for factual information about the life and death of Marlon Brando, or most of the other pop culture subjects it touches on, even though the aesthetic pleasures it offers are off the charts.  And I haven't read Obama's DREAMS OF MY FATHER, so this is not my opinion, but I've heard several (hugely Obama-supporting) folks comment on its overdone sentimentality and unpalatable earnestness; at least one rabidly Democratic yet perhaps painfully astute reader told me it "sucked."  But a book of its kind at least has the potential to convey information that could be useful to voters: factual information about Obama's background, and the added bonus of some insight into his values and reasoning.  Unless it was ghostwritten.  In which case I'm going to have to vote for Palin next time, because everyone knows she writes her books all by herself.

My point is that evaluating the quality of a book is always partly dependent on knowing if it's supposed to be read as nonfiction.  And whether or not Frey saw his own book as having enough artistic merit to draw an audience primarily motivated by aesthetic pleasure, the rejections must have made him realize that the publishers who had read it didn't agree -- that they believed it would be valuable to readers only for the information it contained, presumably the life lessons gleaned from his battle against addiction.  This meant that he had three options.  

• First, he could have tried submitting the novel to small, independent presses and first novel contests as it was, or with minor revisions, "sticking to his guns," trusting his original vision.  If he was unable to sell his first book, he could put it in a drawer, write another one, and go through the process again.  
• Let me point out two obvious things about this: first, it would not have made him rich and famous, and second, it would have been sincere and honest, both factually and artistically.  Our culture values wealth and fame and does not value factual or artistic sincerity and honesty, so in the story of James Frey, many people have concluded that the mere possibility of wealth and fame, the simple temptation of it, must have been utterly irresistible -- that no further explanation is needed to understand why Frey did what he did. 
• Maybe this would be more plausible if James Frey was straight out of rehab, couch-surfing and freegan, so that publishing a book looked like the only possible golden ticket to save him from his depressed existence.  But that was not the case.  James Frey was a successful screenwriter who penned the 1998 David Schwimmer vehicle Kissing a Fool, among other scripts, and the advance Doubleday ultimately offered him for the book was $50,000 -- not chump change, by any stretch of the imagination, but not big bucks by Hollywood standards either.  One might, in fact, argue that he had already sold out, so doing it twice was unnecessary.  In any case, they made him an offer, to misquote the Godfather, that he certainly could have refused.
• Let me point out another obvious fact: many, many talented writers -- writers much more talented than James Frey -- have penned loosely autobiographical first novels and found themselves in a situation similar to the one he was in at this time.  Most of them have not falsely published those novels as nonfiction, instead choosing to go the route described above (sticking to their visions, etc.).  What happens to these people?  No one puts them on TV, or gives them bags of money with which to purchase tasteful modern art.  No one publishes their second books with a huge publicity campaign, fueled by the controversy over their first, or reviews those second books in the New York Times, just to give them another chance ("He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park.").  These people are left, at best, to a small readership, second best, to their pleasures of their art, and at worst, to the prospect of a life in which that art lives on only in a diminished aspect.  Rejection is horrible, those editors' terse emails like a spam virus of the soul, stalling everything that once opened with ease, closing every window.  Yet it's a reality too, one that sorely tests the author's commitment to what he claims to hold dear -- a reality Frey wasn't willing to face.
• Second, Frey could have tried to "fix" the novel, to make it more palatable to commercial editors. Although memoir was a popular genre when he was submitting his book, first novels were -- DUH -- still getting published.  They're still getting published now, with the economy in the toilet!  Frey could have studied up on what sold and tried to make his book conform to those narrow standards.
• But that would have taken work.  Next pls.
• Third, James Frey could have rewritten the book as a memoir, adhering as closely as he could to the reality of his past while still making the prose, structure, and overall vision beautiful, engaging, and insightful.  Because -- and again, here, we enter the Kingdom of the Obvious -- people do, in fact, write memoirs that are actually true, and actually literary nevertheless.
• I imagine that, like every issue of the New York Times, all memoirs contain some factual errors -- "honest mistakes," the kinds of slips of memory and detail or even occasional, minor, intentional embellishment that we all make when recalling our lives.  I am not arguing for raking authors over the coals for these kinds of errors. 
• However, the errors in A MILLION LITTLE PIECES are not these kinds of errors.  Frey recalls, for one example, that he spent three months in prison, when in fact he spent no months in prison.  That would probably be the first thing I'd suggest he edit out.
• But again, doing this would have taken work.

What Frey decided to do instead was not one of the three options I would have presented to him. He decided to do something that no ethical person would consider an option at all, which was to sell a largely fictional book as nonfiction.  He did so knowing that the book's primary selling point in the eyes of the publisher was the fact it was supposedly true.

Frey has pointed out that the publisher must have also known the book was untrue, because the revisions his editor suggested -- shifting timelines, altering characters -- were geared toward improving the story, not toward accuracy.  I have no idea what actually happened, but this certainly seems plausible, since a lot of sleazy people work in publishing.  But the fact that someone else allowed or even encouraged him to lie doesn't make sense as an excuse for lying.  To me, this reads a bit like Bernie Madoff blaming the feeder funds.

But here's the thing.  People make mistakes.  Sometimes they exaggerate or lie or get pretentious.  Sometimes they sell out, and not even for so much money that it makes any sense.  But this, in and of itself, doesn't mean they've entirely thrown their craft under the bus of their own greed, because sometimes they're also honest and repentant about their motivations.

For example: in his excellent essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," David Foster Wallace tears into what he describes as an "essaymercial" by Frank Conroy, author and chair of the Iowa Writers Workshop, which numbers among the promotional materials for a luxury cruise.  Wallace writes: 

The really major badness is that the project and placement of 'My Celebrity Cruise...' are sneaky and duplicitous and far beyond whatever eroded pales still exist in terms of literary ethics.  Conroy's 'essay' appears as an inset, on skinnier pages and with different margins than the rest of the brochure, creating the impression that it has been excerpted from some large and objective thing Conroy wrote. But it hasn't been. The truth is that Celebrity Cruises paid Frank Conroy up-front to write it, even though nowhere in or around the essay is there anything acknowledging that it's a paid endorsement...Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay. 

Yet, after being found out for his complicity in such a depressing, monetarily motivated scheme, what is Conroy's reaction?  Does he blame the limited literary-essay market?  Does he blame the brochure's publishers?  Does he call it a "coping mechanism"?  Does he say he "struggled with the idea of it"?  Does he claim he was bending genres?  Does he defend the essay as essentially sincere?  No. Instead he admits, with what DFW describes as "the small sigh that precedes a certain kind of weary candor":

"I prostituted myself."

What.  A.  Guy.

continue to Part 2...

Making History

I don't often read nonfiction; in general, I find almost anything preferable to reality. However, Jame Loewen's thought-provoking 1996 revisionist text managed to snooker me in with its seductive title: LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME. Although it's filled with surprising information about famous American figures from John Brown to Helen Keller, this book is not primarily a history of the United States. Rather, it's a book-length book review of twelve of the crappiest works of nonfiction imaginable: a representative sampling of high school American history textbooks.

Let me backtrack for a second here. When I was a teenager, I attended (and eventually dropped out of) a conservative religious high school in the Midwest, the kind of hell where a boy with a ponytail gets sent to the principal's office and a girl with a crew cut gets sent to a guidance counselor. Pep rallies were mandatory, and they looked like this:

The Anti-Sex League was a popular alternative to cheerleading.

In short, I hated nearly every minute I spent enclosed in those ironically god-forsaken halls, and the classrooms were even worse. But one class I didn't entirely detest was AP American history. Our teacher was a tremulous-voiced madman so powdered with chalk dust he looked like he'd just survived an explosion, and he addressed us as "children," but with a tone of urgency that suggested not storytime but the last hope of mankind. His lessons on the innumerable tariffs, bills, battles, and Presidents whose progression informed the weekly quizzes were engaging enough, if only because of his forceful way of starting class discussions -- "Children, children! What do you think of this?!" -- but he really came to life on Fridays, when he allowed himself to indulge his passion: conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assasination. To start us off on these paranoid diversions, he always brought in photocopies of what he cryptically referred to as his "documents": telegrams, letters, redacted newspaper articles, photographs, receipts, and an array of other primary source materials, generally involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, LBJ, Kennedy himself, Nixon, or the Cubans. What made these sessions fascinating were not the particular half-baked theories we cooked up as explanations during the discussion, but the sensation that we were actually doing history: that he was empowering us to parse out for ourselves an interpretation of primary sources, and that our conclusions might be as valuable -- even more valuable -- than anything already published in a book.

Part of the reason I found LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME interesting is that Loewen does not set out simply to set the record straight about common historical misconceptions. His larger and more important project is a rethinking of both the way historical narratives are presented and the pedagogy surrounding these narratives. Loewen isn't as much worried that high schoolers don't know "the truth," but that they don't care. Again and again, he points out something that's obvious to anyone who remembers their high school history textbook (and probably even more obvious to those who don't): these books are boring. Before textbook authors can even begin to redress the grave omissions -- and there are many -- they must first learn to write. As Loewen puts it, "Textbooks unfold history without real drama or suspense, only melodrama." Figures from Christopher Columbus to Woodrow Wilson are subjected to what he terms "heroification." In an attempt to cast them as aspirational role models, authors strip them of any potentially controversial qualities, and they become one-dimensional, featureless, indistinguishable figures in an endless parade of feel-good Americana. Positive changes in American life and culture never meet with government (or popular) resistance; progress moves inexorably forward. Events are causeless, struggles without visible opposition, and the outcome -- American triumph -- is never in doubt. This happens again and again in the passages Loewen quotes, even at the level of the sentences, when the authors use the passive voice. It's not just that the books are inaccurate; they don't ring true, because they ignore the significance-making conventions of traditional storytelling -- even more specifically, of good fiction writing.

Potentially, I think this claim is far more earth-shaking than the more specific critiques Loewen advances about the content of sections on slavery, the Vietnam War, and the Pilgrims. It seems to me that if we truly see history as a series of stories we tell ourselves about the past, then it becomes something that can -- and should -- aspire to the condition of art. But, many people would argue, isn't that just total relativism? Are all interpretations created equal? If a "better story" makes for "better history," then can't just anyone be a historian?

The answer, of course, is both yes and no. For something to qualify as history rather than a novel or re-imagining, it obviously must be based in research and verifiable evidence. But beyond that, I do think we should hold history, along with other forms of narrative nonfiction, to the same standards as fiction. It's not enough for a textbook, revisionist or traditionalist, liberal or conservative, to reproduce names and dates for our perusal. It must transform that material into something meaningful, or else it teaches us nothing worth knowing. In a scene from the Steve Martin play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, the character of Albert Einstein offers that his profession is just as concerned with beauty as any artist's: "...the theories must be beautiful. You know why the sun doesn't revolve around the earth? Because the idea is not beautiful enough. If you're trying to prove that the sun revolves around the earth, in order to make the theory fit the facts, you have to have the planets moving backwards, and the sun doing loop-de-loops. Way too ugly." Picasso asks him, "So you're not just describing the world as it is?" and Einstein replies, "No! We are creating a new way of looking at the world!" I would submit that students should learn to see history the same way: as something made, by and for the human mind.

Reading David Foster Wallace in an Airport

Walking through an airport is like walking through the subconscious of America. On my way to the gate this weekend, carrying my shoes, I passed Cinnabon, McDonald's, Panda Express, Chili's To Go, and continued past TV screens of Barack Obama cut like dumbed-down drugs with cell phone commercials, past bookstores that shone with glossy ghostwritten books decorated with the names of celebrities. On the walls, posters made an elaborate, strained analogy between Tiger Woods and some under-explained business service; they showed the same image of an apple three times, under the words "Organic," "Imported," "Engineered." This is not an apple. This is a PC. Bing goes the internet. So easy a cave man could do it. Businessmen hunched over laptops like turtles half in the shell, children hunched over portable games that looked like smaller laptops in their tiny hands. The air smelled like nothing, then like fast food, then like nothing again. The floor shined and squeaked. Our bags could be searched at any time. And then I sat down at the gate, my back to as many TVs as possible, to read A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN.

I feel as though I have a tortured relationship with David Foster Wallace, although I've never met the guy. Let me do the requisite idiotic blogger thing of comparing myself, point by point, to someone infinitely more talented and famous: we both grew up in central Illinois. We're both afraid of the rides in Happy Hollow. We've both been hide-the-knives depressed (hell, who hasn't). We both love Thomas Pynchon. We both overthink the obvious, then overthink our thinking. We both hate irony and cynicism while being compulsively ironic and cynical. I do not know, but I suspect, that we would both call the essays in his book A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN far more frightening and lonesome than "hilarious," as so many blurbers chose to label them. Screams of laughter, in this case, are nonetheless still real screams.

The reason I call my relationship with David Foster Wallace "tortured" is that, while I love his work (or at least his nonfiction -- shamefully I've yet to read INFINITE JEST, and haven't reread THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM in years), I at the same time find it so disturbing, so hopelessly, anxiety-inducingly true, that it kind of devastates me and makes me want to lunge immediately in the direction of the nearest Marilynne Robinson novel, to retreat to a world where young girls press flowers into books instead of donning T-shirts silkscreened with advertisements depicting images from ironic beer commercials in order to audition for a televised DO YOU REALLY KNOW THE 80's pop culture trivia game show.

There's a natural attraction for writers (at least for me) to the world of "real things" -- observable, nameable things, things like butter churns and the translucent ears of kittens glowing pink with sunlight, as opposed to the fleeting visions flashing by in pop-up windows or stock tickers or television screens, or the complex systems and theories behind such visions. Working as we do in the already abstracted medium of language, we are told, "Writers write with nouns and verbs" -- "End on an image and don't explain it." David Foster Wallace is all explanation, all "making sense of" -- only even then, the complexity boggles him, and though his theses and postulates and conclusions are numerous, by the end of most essays he's left himself and the reader reeling. But, sitting in the airport, surrounded by screens that twinkled all around like cities glimpsed from the air, I had to wonder if there was any other way to write.