A student in my Freshman English class said yesterday that whenever he sits down to write he does two things about the subject he has been given: one, he tries to find a personal angle into the material, and second, he tries to think positive thoughts about it. The second point puzzled me. I asked him to explain and he said that any writing he produces is not going to be “balanced” if he is only thinking bad things about what he is supposed to write. I was wondering how to take the class discussion forward with the point he had made–I was at a loss, actually–when the student himself offered me a way out. He asked me if I could think of a book-review where the reviewer hated the book–and the review had still turned out to be interesting. The dark pedagogical clouds suddenly parted; the name “Dale Peck” flashed like lightning in the air.

“Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” Like everyone else who ever invokes Peck’s name, I repeated the well-known line from his review. Here, dear students, is the whole review; but, if you’re going to go ahead and read it, please also read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Peck’s “hatchet jobs” in the NYRB. Mendelsohn admits that Peck’s detractors are not more fun to read, but they might be right about a couple of things. “There is, to begin with, the problem of overkill… and second, that what’s really going on here isn’t so much criticism as a kind of performance—it’s as if Peck wants to show you not what’s wrong with [the writer under review], but how good a writer he, Peck, is.”

In India, in the pages of the Hindu, Pradeep Sebastian wrote: “We need an Indian Dale Peck to closely and accurately assess some of our more mediocre and overrated writers. Peck’s great gift is to show — not tell — us where a writer has gone wrong. ‘The massive literary advances and domination of display and review space have crowded out competitors,’ he objects to James Atlas. ‘The lavish praise critics bestow on contemporary fiction renders them complicit in its mediocrity.’” I support what Sebastian is saying, but I also think that in India, in particular, there is also another problem. The enemy is not only mediocrity, it is also malice; and I have nowhere else read criticism that is so driven by matters utterly extraneous to literary merit. Peck is a critic who probably less than most will give people reason to pause before dispensing judgment. But Sebastian is right to advocate a more critical practice. Here’s another nugget from Peck in an interview in the Guardian (Thanks, Maud Newton):

When I ask him to characterise the US reviewing scene, he cheers up: ‘I am not sure if you can print this. But they are a bunch of pussies. They are back-scratchers, afraid for their own careers - novelists reviewing their friends’ works. It is very dishonest.’ Does he ever worry about the effect his reviews may have on writers? ‘The truth is that if you can’t hack a negative review, you shouldn’t be writing at that particular level. I really do believe a novel is nothing more than a strongly expressed opinion and that you need to respond strongly and with vitality.’

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