An Arsonist’s Guide to Overrated Writers

By Timothy Schaffert

 

Some curmudgeonly discourse at Huffington Post has resulted in forty pages of comments (I know this not because I’ve skimmed them all, but because a recent post consisted only of the following sentence: “Do people actually read 40 pages of comments?”). The debate is between a critic and his critics, centered on Anis Shivani’s list: “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers.”

 

It’s a scrumptious set-up, and if the whole subject weren’t so inconsequential, one would be tempted to call it incendiary. (Would anyone approach such a list expecting to see the literary scene coddled and celebrated, with logic, reason, and sportsmanlike conduct?) It’s theater, if not full-on vaudeville, and has been accused of everything from poor taste to political incorrectness to anti-woman bias, all playing nicely into Mr. Shivani’s interactive performance. (I do think the blogger Jezebel does Shivani a disservice by casting him as merely misogynist, when he has labored so to appear misanthropic.)

 

I like many of the writers Shivani skewers (and admit that some of them I’ve not read), but I’d enjoy it if he skewered even more of my favorites. The list has the quality of a collection of bubblegum cards to be collected and swapped—a literary Wacky Packs. Expand the list to 100 overrated writers! (We’re promised his list of underrated writers too, which is destined to prove anti-climactic. There’s certainly no shortage of chummy backslapping in the lit world. And what constitutes being underrated? Uniformly bad reviews? Meager sales? Enormous sales? Self-pub?) And how can you resist the tab along the side of Shivani’s article that allows you to rate just how overrated each writer is? (On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “No, this author is great!” and 10 being “Totally overrated!,” Jorie Graham gets an 8, the highest score of literary low-down; Jhumpa Lahiri fares the best with a wishy-washy 5.)

 

Yes, such vitriol makes for good, career-making viral blog scuffles, but Shivani’s discourse isn’t shallow and egocentric—he’s a critic made giddy by a poorly turned phrase, but he’s also seeking to dissect the anatomy of the literary establishment. He perhaps lends too much taste-making influence to the Pulitzer (has anybody, outside of tight literary circles, ever felt inclined to quibble about the Pulitzer the way people do the Oscars, for example?), and perhaps not enough to the corporate machinery that lifts a writer from underrated to overrated, and nothing at all about the relationships between booksellers and readers (and the possibility that readers/consumers end up playing a part in what writers write and publish in a commercial, mass-market medium—a bookstore isn’t an art gallery). And his distinction between good and bad writing seems fatuous (why does such a distinction need to be defined? Doesn’t the very notion of such a definition contradict his argument? And whose morality dictates a “lack of a moral core,” whatever that is?). The fear of offending in academic circles (and, by extension, fear of offending editors, contest judges, and blogger/critics compiling lists of over- and underrated writers) certainly rings true. But was the literary publishing world ever a meritocracy? Would Willa Cather have had her success had she stayed in Red Cloud, Nebraska, instead of following her instincts and hoofing it on over to where the publishers were?

 

In any event, it’s all “useful mischief,” in the words of Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. Yardley, however, was speaking of B.R. Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto,” a previous dressing-down of the literary elite (and rigorously opposed to “pretentious” prose of the high-purple variety, practiced by Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo and other notables) that ran in the Atlantic nearly ten years ago. And Yardley evokes an even older bit of mischief-making: “Panic Among the Philistines: The literary vulgarians,” by Bryan F. Griffin, which ran in Harper’s in 1981, which itself references the earlier kvetchings of Roderick MacLeish (“…have you gotten through Moby Dick more than once?” MacLeish reportedly sneered in the Post) and even earlier, Matthew Arnold (“Ignorance and charlatanism in work of this kind are always trying to pass off their wares as excellent and to cry down criticism as the voice of an insignificant, overfastidious minority”).

 

Griffin’s useful mischief, however, is intended to dismiss the dismissers, declaring such petulance as a trend of the new decade: the 1980s. “…[T]he competition to decide which writer couldn’t read the most books,” Griffin writes, “was threatening to get out of hand, and there was a general sigh of relief when the publishing house Harper and Row announced that it would no longer publish any books that could not first prove to a ‘marketing computer’ that they would show a ‘substantial return.’”

 

Griffin aligns the new-wave/punk impulse to trash The Scarlet Letter (as “a prissy piece of drivel”) with that of defending Bob Guccione’s all-star porno Caligula (as artful education). Ultimately, Griffin and Shivani share a similar distaste for contemporary literature—Griffin laments the scatological and over-sexed preoccupations of the contemporary author of 1980; Shivani subtitles his entry on Sharon Olds “Tampons and Lactation” (which led to blogger Jezebel’s response titled “Literary critic hates vaginas,” a title likely inspired by the kind of “literary barbarianism” that so vexed Griffin thirty years ago. Among Griffin’s targets are Edmund White—Griffin implies that White’s college students aren’t safe from his lechery—and Maxine Kumin, whose poetry Griffin facetiously labels “folk ballads.” Oh, you really must do yourself a favor and read the whole Harper’s piece, aloud if you can; perform it for your ragdolls.)

 

And nearly thirty years before authors could upload their own e-books to online booksellers willy-nilly, Griffin already cautioned of “fluency” and the intellectual chaos that reigns “when all the sonnets of precocious childhood are slapped between hard covers.” So Griffin and Shivani—and all those critics ever in protest of “the prevailing balderdash of the day” (Yardley, again)—seem to call for the return of old-school editorial instinct, a commitment to the task of discovery, rather than to the hem-lines of literary fashion. So while the current electronic fluency seems to suggest the much missed (or much over-celebrated) loss of the gatekeeper, such rants remind us that the gate-keepers make us cranky too.

 

 

Comments

[Elizabeth Mack]

Shivani’s list has done what it set out to do - he is now the talk of the literary establishment. He has stoked literature's embers into a bonfire of attention for himself.

[Trey Conatser]

Yes, Timothy, this is the kind of conversation that *should* be happening in response to the Shivani brouhaha.

As more and more writers take up the pen (or keyboard) and enter/exit writing programs that continue to increase in number, and as more periodicals and publishers pop up (especially in the pragmatic digital format), how do we determine what is worthy of elevation to canon status (at least in terms of a contemporary canon, which in most cases is different than how it is reflected in the historical canon)? Is the weight limit of an elevator an apt comparison? (CHE recently ran an intentionally exaggerated piece that spoke to the accelerating proliferation of publication venues, mostly electronic). Despite egalitarian rhetoric, one can argue that a "canon" of sorts still exists as a concept--just consider the indignation inspired by Shivani's treatment.

How will our currency (largely derived from the last quarter of the 20th century) for literary merit adapt to a 21st century literary milieu? I'm very interested to see where it all goes.

[emily m. danforth]

I agree with Trey, this is a fantastic approach to the Shivani piece--one that is smart and funny and grounded in a familiarization with the history of these kinds of "Shivani-esque" attacks, and also one that is completely aware of not only the hyperbolic rhetoric of the list itself, but the similar rhetoric of most the ensuing conversations now cropping up all over the internet (and elsewhere).

However, since I do so love "useful mischief," maybe just one more rant about Shivani's distinctions between "good writing" and "bad writing":

You've pulled out his ridiculous "insight" about "lack of a moral core" in all of this "bad writing," but even more deliciously inane is his proclamation a a few sentences later: "These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism." (Pause for laughter.)
Really? And what legacy, exactly, is that? Someone please line by line it for me so that when I sit down to write my next novel I can keep, always, said legacy in mind, like Luke and the Force, for fear of, gasp, "betraying" it.

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