Wednesday, April 20, 2011

The Pale King's New Clothes

For those who are not DFW enthusiasts, or those who (not without reason) think much too much is being made of a fragment, here's Steve Donahue's devastating take-down of both DFW and Tom McCarthy's review of The Pale King:

Wallace wrote a 1000-page novel in part in the smug assumption that such an act would protect him from any accusation of laziness – and yet he was the laziest American author since Sydney Sheldon. In writing as in life, laziness isn’t defined by how little you do – it’s defined by how much you’re willing to do to avoid work. Wallace buried his editors and publishers with hundreds of pages of ‘notes’ and ‘clarifications,’ buried his books in hundreds and hundreds of pages of pointless verbiage, but he didn’t do any of that for the reasons he helped the literary world to craft. There was never any of the ‘tortured artist with so much to say‘ involved in all that over-production … it, all of it, every page of it, was produced in order to avoid doing the actual work of writing, the shaping of plot and character and action, the whittling and revising and precision that are supposed to separate the novelist from the tyro. That’s epic, Biblical laziness.

And it prompts laziness in turn. McCarthy at one point is practically asleep at the keyboard when he writes, “The issues of emotion and agency remain central, but are incorporated into a larger argument about the possibility or otherwise of these things within contemporary fiction.” I’m not at all sure what any of that means, but I’d hazard a guess that “issues of emotion and agency” are central to pretty much every novel ever written. These are the kinds of things reviewers write when the grip of a celebrity season is upon them, and even Wallace deserves better.
even Wallace. Ouch. Sydney Sheldon. Double ouch.

[Via]



5 comments:

km said...

Umm..."Sydney Sheldon"? "Biblical laziness"?

JP said...

Interesting, but Donohue loses me with 'all of it, every page of it, was produced in order to avoid doing the actual work of writing, the shaping of plot and character and action, the whittling and revising and precision that are supposed to separate the novelist from the tyro.'

He seems to preclude the possibility of achieving the same results through different means, which boils down to little more than blinkered literary conservatism.

Space Bar said...

km: I shoulda put a [sic] there against Sydney, no?

jp: I'm not saying there's some literary conservatism at work here, but I can't help admitting that DFW had a discomfitting number of verbal tics. I really liked Oblivion and his essays but I couldn't get through more than a few pages of IJ. Of course, that might say more about me than about DFW, but there it is.

JP said...

Fair enough. I finished several hundred pages of IJ but haven't completed it either; whereas I devoured Perec's similarly massive (though not quite as) Life: A User's Manual with rapt attention, a work marked by considerable formal experimentation but not lacking in the basic literary values Donoghue cites. Still I think experiments like Wallace's are with merit, in the same way in which one can learn much and derive a great deal of pleasure from say William S Burroughs.

JP said...

...which is not to suggest Wallace is of the same rank and brilliance as Burroughs.

I find Kunzru's take more interesting than McCarthy's or Donoghue's: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d20a33a2-66e1-11e0-8d88-00144feab49a.html#axzz1JgukRknp