PECK VS. THE PACK (via Mike Daley):

Hatchet man: Dale Peck is the scourge of literary America, laying into everyone from Julian Barnes to Don DeLillo. Is aggression a critical virtue, and should British reviewers follow his lead? (Kate Kellaway, November 23, 2003, The Observer)

There is a new verb in the US: to Peck. Or an old verb with a new meaning. Dale Peck is a literary one man bandit - he trashes everything he reads. Is this a dagger I see before me? Or a review by Dale Peck? He specialises in opening lines such as: 'Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.' No one is let off lightly: Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Jim Crace - name an author and they have all been Pecked. He has published three novels himself and is hyperactively well read, with an eye for detail and a transparent personal agenda about what the contemporary novel ought to be (as close to his own as possible). In the US, his reviews have caused a sensation. And in May, his collected criticism is to be published, on both sides of the Atlantic, under the title Hatchet Jobs.

Reading his reviews, there is a sense that Peck's writing is motored by a rage that has little to do with literature. There are clues in his biography. He grew up on Long Island, the son of an alcoholic plumber. His mother died in mysterious circumstances when he was three and he has put it on record that 'violence' may have had something to do with it. When his father discovered his son was gay, he beat him up. Peck's father is important here, if only because his latest book is a 'memoir' about his father's childhood (What We Lost, published in February by Granta). Dale Peck emerges as a fighter with the evangelical zeal of a Jehovah's
Witness for whom the End of the Novel is Nigh. He was educated at Drew University in New Jersey and took a creative writing course at Columbia. He was talent-spotted as a critic by James Wood, who commissioned him to write in the back pages of the New Republic, back pages that were to make front-page news.

Peck's admirers value him because of the scale of his ambitions as a critic. There is an almost suicidal valour about seeing off so many writers with such assurance. And Peck is as scathing about the fiction of the past as he is of the present. The modernist tradition, he writes, 'began with the diarrhoeic flow of words that is Ulysses, continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov, and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth, Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of
Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid - just plain stupid - tomes of DeLillo'. In a single sentence: class dismissed.

MORE:
Critics on Reviews (Mary Gannon, March 2003, Poets & Writers)

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call book reviewing a labor of love, except for the fact that it is so often a vilified profession. Reviewers are accused of having agendas and of cronyism, are called show-offs and career-killers. It’s a lot of heat to take for some free books, a few bucks, and a byline.

So what’s the draw?

“I think a lot of people have this itch to be in something that might be called the cultural conversation. [Reviewing] is one of the most direct paths in,” says Sven Birkerts, whose reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. “You really are interacting with authors and readers. You’re playing the culture sport, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in doing that.”

For Laura Miller, Salon senior writer and biweekly columnist for the New York Times Book Review, the appeal of writing reviews is the appeal of writing in general—“getting a chance to work out what you think and to put your point of view out there as part of the big conversation. And it’s great to be able to read all these books that I might not have the time to read otherwise if it weren’t my profession.”

Of course, not all books provide a singular reading experience, but there’s the thrill of finding those that do. “When you come across that sense of amazing discovery you think, ‘Boy, all those mediocre books—it was worth slogging through them to get to this,’” says Jonathan Yardley, Dirda’s colleague at the Washington Post Book World and also a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism.

Dirda says that the happiest hours of his life are those six hours in the evenings when he writes his weekly piece for Book World. The act of writing and the idea that his work serves “to keep reading going, to keep the excitement of books alive for another generation or two,” compels him.

“Reading of any kind is a leisure activity,” says Miller, “and if we make people feel like they’ve wasted their time, they’re bored, they could have been watching Sex and the City, then all we do is discourage them from reading again the next time they have a choice. Our job is to be interesting and to make people feel like they’ve added something to their lives by reading what you’ve provided, even if all they’ve done is laugh.”

But not everyone is laughing. Book reviewers and the state of book reviewing itself are often under assault, especially by authors. In the inaugural (March 2003) issue of the Believer, a monthly literary magazine, novelist and coeditor Heidi Julavits wrote in her introductory essay, “I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake.… I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community, infiltrating the pages of many publications.”