BR Myers is Satan

(Update: Meanwhile, across town, I've been called out as something of a wanker myself.  Well, that's probably accurate, but at least I don't ask anyone to pay me for it.  If you want to read more tsk-tsking from your wanker pal the Rake, go here for my rebuttal.)

(Update 2: BR Myers is Hello Kitty.)

Just when you thought BR "Master of the Fortune Cookie Manifesto" Myers couldn't be any more of a wanker, here he comes again with his first taste of the Denis Johnson oeuvre stinging and bitter in his mouth:

When a novel's first words are "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed," and the rest of it evinces no more feel for the English language and often a good deal less, and America's most revered living writer touts "prose of amazing power and stylishness" on the back cover, and reviewers agree that whatever may be wrong with the book, there's no faulting its finely crafted sentences -- when I see all this, I begin to smell a rat. Nothing sinister, mind you. It's just that once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there.

Having read nothing by Denis Johnson except Tree of Smoke, his latest novel, I see no reason to consider him a great or even a good writer, but he is apparently very well thought of by everyone else.

That, my friends, is what's known as a display of big brass balls.

Myers is going to use his carefully cultivated (and forthrightly admitted) ignorance to (1) crap on Tree of Smoke and (2) accuse everyone else--most of whom have actually read some of Johnson's other work--of being liars.

And if you think he's not going to spend the rest of this review cherry-picking the less impressive passages out of a 624-page novel, well, then, you've got another think coming.  It's not even worth rebutting him; some of what he pulls out isn't very good, but you or I could just as easily come up with great passages that apologize for any missteps.  (See here.)

But that's not enough for Myers.  No, everything's a conspiracy, and de gustibus is just cover that allows the literary establishment to contribute to the "rot" of our culture:

One closes the book only with a renewed sense of the decline of American literary standards. It would be foolish to demand another Tolstoy, but shouldn't we expect someone writing about the Vietnam War to have more sense and eloquence than the politicians who prosecuted it?

Those two qualities are linked. There can be no deep thought without the proper use of words, as our current president never fails to demonstrate. This is why it is dangerous to hold up bad English as good and why Philip Roth should know better than to announce that Johnson writes "prose of amazing power and stylishness." There are people who will take that seriously. Less worrying, because so obviously lunatic, is Jonathan Franzen's blurb: "The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson's." Really? Then God help Jonathan Franzen.

Let's hear from a man who, for all his intellectual shortcomings, never said anything he didn't mean. Ezra Pound wrote this in 1931:

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

The "application of word to thing" has been rotting for some time now, and in the very terms described. The social and political consequences are all around us. Literati who contribute to the rot whether to preserve a writer's reputation, to stimulate the book market, or simply to go with the flow have no right to complain about incoherent government. The next time they want to praise a bad book, they should rave about the plot instead.

So, shorter BR Myers: Those who disagree with my aesthetic assessments share the responsibility for the Bush Administration's crimes.

As Fred MacMurray sez: That tears it.  We might as well stop searching for the ne plus ultra Fortune Cookie Manifesto, because this is it.

Now how about this for a "jumble of language levels": Fuck you, BR Myers.

Comments

[Brian]

Youch! Something tells me you don't agree with Myers' assessment of Johnson. I haven't read Johnson, but, in general, I can't help but agree with Pound's statement: "the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated." Things have gotten a bit fuzzy, don't you think? I haven't had the urge to transmit these thoughts into the aether, which Myers apparently has no problem with, but I often find myself closing a few "good" books well before I've worked my way to the back cover, frustrated and tired of the tabid senteces and paragraphs they've offered. Where has our love of the bounty language offers gone?

That being said, I'm now going to make a point of reading Johnson, both the title in question, and a few of his other works. Hopefully, I'll like what I find.

[R Ellis]

The main problem with Myers's essay is that it's flat-out wrongo, and actually, in context, Johnson's sentences are AMAZING and INNOVATIVE.

Myers reminds me of all those critics who ran out of the premier of Rite of Spring, howling: Whatever happened to good ole fashioned MUSIC????

[Mike B.]

"Johnson's sentences are AMAZING and INNOVATIVE."

Writing those words in all-caps doesn't make them true.

What makes a sentence innovative?

[REllis]

Check out my husband's post on this very subject -- he's reading Tree of Smoke right now.

http://wardsix.blogspot.com/2007/12/damned-good-sentence.html

[Mike B.]

Thank you for pointing me towards that example.

"An infestation of tiny black beetles numerous as raindrops roamed the gusts and sailed past."

For me, that's actually *not* a good sentence. I'll beat you to the punch momentarily by saying that yes, I recognize that it's difficult to believe that I'm being open-minded. I can only hope you'll take my word for it.

This is one of those sentences that sounds interesting because it's startling. Then, upon further reflection, it sort of falls apart because none of the components makes sense.

I know bugs because I've loved them since I was a boy. Read books on entomology. Volunteered as an adult at my zoo's invertebrate house. What Johnson is writing here doesn't sound like beetles to me. And I know, the idea is that he's supposed to be invoking rain -- and, clearly, he's done that for your husband. But I'm left unconvinced.

Then we get to "roamed the gusts." This clause doesn't work with the idea of a wind storm at all. "Roaming" -- at least for this reader -- has a passive feel to it. These beetles aren't roaming the gusts; Johnson has told us they're tiny, so they're being buffeted about violently.

And sure: I'm no doubt probably proudly wearing my Captain Pedantic pants. I can accept that as a counter. But that's what keeps Johnson's prose from being perfect for me. He's wielding words and concepts unskillfully -- he's not ever seen beetles in the way he's writing about beetles, so it feels false.

[REllis]

Mike -- Who do you think does great sentences, then? There are a lot of ways to be interesting on the page, and powerful, and Johnson does it in a way that -- if you don't want to call it "innovative" -- is definitely original, which counts an awful lot for me.

You seem rather stuck on the idea that literature needs to have a direct and realistic correspondence to the actual world. I understand what you mean about "falseness," but isn't it also legitimate for writing to have a more dream-like, bizarre relationship to reality? For instance, the bugs may not really "roam the gusts," but it might be more interesting and compelling to see them as if they do. And because, frankly, we have enough realistic and literal books about Vietnam.

I'm very curious to know whose sentences you do find wonderful. A lot of this is a matter of taste, of course. What you call "bad" I might call "deliberately awkward" or "non-literal."

[Mike B.]

"Who do you think does great sentences, then?"

This is an awkward question for me. I always end up sounding pompous and dorky simultaneously. Also, we're not going to accomplish any niche-filling here. If I can't come up with any one to take Johnson's place in your mind, that doesn't mean that Johnson, by default, writes good sentences.

Ninety-five percent of my reading is 19th century fiction. Primarily Victorian. And of *that*, primarily early-to-mid Victorian.

I've probably unfairly pictured you rolling your eyes. "Of *course*," I've imagined you saying (again, probably unfairly); "that explains a lot." I get that all the time. There aren't a lot of people out there reading "Dombey & Son" for example.

But Dickens writes good sentences. He describes a woman, in "David Copperfield," as having a purse that snaps close like a bite. This is a good sentence in my book because, while purses don't literally have teeth, the description of that purse, and the sound the purse makes, further characterizes Miss Murdstone. Consequently, I disagree with Johnson's sentence because he hasn't thought the imagery through. It sounds interesting, but it doesn't sound plausible. I'm not against dreamlike imagery (I very much enjoyed Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled" -- which is nothing but one long dream image). I guess I am against writerly writing that doesn’t inform the reader at all.

Another way, though, in which this exercise fails me: I don't have my books with me, so I can't rattle off a bunch of great sentences I know from memory. But Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Gissing, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte (especially "Villette") -- these are all good sentence writers.

Closer to our own time, I think Nabakov writes fine sentences -- "Pale Fire" being my favorite book of fine sentences. There are the gents I mentioned in my previous response, too. I am especially fond of Kazuo Ishiguro.

I agree with you mostly when you say that good sentences are a matter of taste. My taste is more aligned with Myers than with yours, though, it seems. Because of this, I also disagree with your characterization of Myers as a critic. I don't ever feel he's being disingenuous or fake. However, the one nice thing that has come out of this is this conversation. No one who sits near my cubicle talks about books at all. I've enjoyed our conversation very much.

[R Ellis]

No eye rolls here. I have great respect for the Victorians, though I haven't read them much since college (except Collins). Nabokov and Ishiguro are two of my favorites. I do think Johnson is doing something different from what they all do -- and that's one reason I find him exciting.

You're right about my feelings about Myers -- and honestly, it has less to do with his opinions about specific works than his entire take on criticism: he likes to imply that people who disagree with him are frauds who don't *really* love literature. He seems very bitter and narrow to me, as if his literary opinions were formed as a reaction to some perceived slight.

In any case, I've enjoyed this too. I'm home alone with a flock of chickens today. If only they said Book book instead of Bok bok...

[Rake]

My general response to all this is set down in a new post, but I would like to caution against--or at least question--this notion of falsity set forward here.

I think readers are bound to be sorely disappointed if they dissect every sentence looking for a 1-to-1 correspondence between text and what they believe to be reality.

If Johnson's trying to sell you a book on entomology or the history of the Vietnam War, then by all means you have a right to carefully challenge him on issues of fact, even minor ones.

In a novel, not so much. There is, and must be, in fiction and poetry some license granted to let the artist create her work. (Granted, the ability to temporarily suspend disbelief is somewhat in the artist's hands, but the reader must also bear that responsibility.)

Otherwise, taken to the logical extreme, we'd be requiring both Johnson and the reader to have personally witnessed roaming gusts of beetles before the latter can judge whether or not Johnson has written a sentence that feels right.

It seems to me that Myers is happy to deny specific writers artistic license and also judge from the outside what they have and haven't "seen," working backward from an overly literal reading of certain passages. As if the imagination didn't exist.

"He's wielding words and concepts unskillfully -- he's not ever seen beetles in the way he's writing about beetles, so it feels false."

I mean, how can you possibly know he's never seen beetles in this way? Simply because you're not persuaded, he a fraud? (I understand you have background here, but have you seen every beetle and gust of wind in Vietnam such that this sentence represents a rank impossibility?)

And even if Johnson hasn't personally witnessed what he's relating, how is it he's not allowed any license to create a vivid image?

I'll just finish by saying that I think the sentence works. To me "gust" implies (or can imply) "sporadic," which means the beetles can "roam" and "sail" from gust to gust. Even allowing for a steady wind, I can see these beetles as so light that they cannot be blown about in a violent manner, in the same way that one cannot throw a crumpled ball of paper very violently.

[JRLennon]

See, the whole point of Johnson--the thing that sets him apart--is his ability to use English in a way that makes the impossible tangible. As in the famous ending to "Car Crash While Hitchhiking":

"It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you."

That passage is evocatively nonsensical, and highly specific in its eccentricity. It does not represent the real world, it supplements and enigmatizes it.

I'm with Mike in that all those writers he likes, I like too. Especially Ishiguro, whose best book, in my opinion, "Unconsoled," bears far less resemblance to the real world than most of the past 25 years of fiction in English. But I like a lot of other writers besides those, whose approaches to representing (or not) reality vary wildly. You go to these writers for different reasons than you go to the Victorians. If Mike doesn't want to go there, that's fine--there are places I don't like going either. But Myers doesn't want ANYBODY to go where he doesn't want to go.

Myers isn't smart enough to say why he thinks a sentence is bad, or admit that other opinions may differ. He FEELS a sentence is bad, because it offends his sensibilities. But his sensibilities are pathetically narrow. The world is too messy for him; he can't bear the chaos of nonrepresentational art. And he can't bear the possibility that there might be millions of people getting off on prose he doesn't understand. So he tries to deny that these people exist--he tries to call them liars.

Myers is an insecure, embittered twerp, that's his problem. OUR problem is that we're still talking about him.

[Garth]

Rake-

Thanks for taking the time to address this, and also for not taking too much time. Your post saved me from the migraine whose aura flares up whenever my thoughts turn to the small-minded dyspepsia of B.R. Myers. Look out...here it comes again.

Flare 1: Now that Myers and Hitchens are both reviewing for the Atlantic, that magazine's readers can get their opinions from TWO critics who can't be bothered to do their homework. (See Sam Sack's piece on Exit Ghost at Open Letters). In this company, Caitlin Flanagan looks like Elizabeth Hardwick. I'll leave it to you to sort out the implications.

Flare 2: It strikes me that Myers is symptomatic of a critical hostility to poetry...an insistence that every creative transformation of the denotative and connotative possibilities of a given word is an abuse tantamount to "misunderestimated." James Wood can be overly literal, too - see his review of Falling Man and the ensuing comment thread on The Elegant Variation - but at least Wood is driven by a passion for books. Wood is like a priest with a taste for precision; Myers is, essentially, a statistician. Or have I not put this literally enough?

Let me try again. Were Shakespeare still alive and kicking, Myers might well be savaging him for his coinages, for his tortuous syntax, for his metaphorical fecundity and, above all, for daring to try to give voice to that which we cannot speak of. "Take arms against a sea? How can one do battle with a body of water?" I'd love to see Myers tackle Gary Lutz.

Ah, well. I'm off to take some aspirin.

[jamessal]

Funny that while repeating the old sloppy-language-is-responsible-for-everything-bad-in-the -world-canard, Myers should quote Ezra Pound -- an anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer, who also happened to write very well.

[Tbone]

If Meyers hates it, just one more reason to go out and buy it.
Seriously, after how hilariously his Reader’s Manifesto’s predictions imploded over the last 6 years you would think smart editors wouldn’t want to be associated with him. Only in a job as irrelevant as book critic could one fall so consistently on one's face and still have a job.

I mean, most of his venom was used on Cormac McCarthy who he said would have no staying power and whose prose no one enjoyed except lit snobs. Now McCarthy might as well be the best selling author in America with endorsements from everyone from the Pulitzer to Oprah. Everyone I know outside of the literary world, from my dad to my neighbors, have been reading and loving him.

and certainly Annie Proulx’s reputation hasn’t been hurt by having the film adaptation of her story win a billion awards, and DeLillo is all over the places these days.

And looking at this review, why is BR Meyers spending the whole time reviewing the REVIEWS instead of reviewing the book. That sounds like the kind of thing Meyers would ostensibly hate, if he actually had any consistent principles.

Oh well, just another hack with a tin-ear trying to play book critic.

[Jacob Russell]

So the assumption is that Myers pulls out Pound to take a swipe at the Bushistas, blaming contemporary fiction (and only the likes of Myers could know what that is)for our imperial mess?

Curious assumption.

His critical method (if you can call it that), seems more in tune with the New Criterion crowd. I've only wondered why he wasn't more up front in playing this political saw--thinking (I have absolutely no way to know, understand) that his complaints were about the usual neocon faux-Straussian melange: relativism, elevation of pop culture over classical, la la la... in other words, a sort of literary Podhoriz... but not as smart.

But who would know?