Fiction Enclosure Before Spike was born, I was …

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Fiction Enclosure

Before Spike was born, I was given a novel to review, The Law of Enclosures by Dale Peck. I found the book unreadable, and returned it. The flowery vocabulary, suggesting a heightened sense of awareness, of significance and import, suggested to me, instead, somebody trying too hard to impress. It�s an affliction from which many �budding� novelists suffer. Or rather, their readers suffer, unless they too are easily impressed. Martin Amis� Money made such an impression on me when I began to read novels. Now I think it was a matter of confusing brilliance with greatness.

So it was with surprise that I read this extraordinary book review by Peck for The New Republic. He criticises the �postmodern� novel in general, and Rick Moody�s entire output in particular, by lamenting both the �diarrheic flow of words� and the �lifeless carpentry� that, he says, characterises both. Is he aware of his own culpability? Perhaps. The review gives hints of contradictory impulses. It is both offensive (”Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation”) and magnanimous (”He has a true writer’s sensibility”). Overall, his critique rests on what he detects as a lack of �the quasi-mystical animating aspect of literature � called prophecy.�

In this final respect, I agree with him, almost wholeheartedly. The difference can be seen, as Peck implies, by contrasting two novels by one great writer: Nabokov’s Lolita against Pale Fire. This is something to explore. Unfortunately, much else in his review is bombastic, wrongheaded nonsense.

This aspect of the review will be what gains attention. No doubt Arts & Letters Daily will link to it as it slags off an attempt to be artistically serious (although it was good to see a link to a Chomsky article tucked away on the site yesterday). For a long time now, the �literary� novel has been tarred with the same brush as the products of the clever, witty wannabes (those still impressed by �Pale Fire� for example) who thrive in a culture dominated by charisma and hype. The subsequent disenchantment with such literature, and the loud voices in the media announcing their �call me old-fashioned� preference for genre fiction, is inevitable. However, if �literary� is taken to refer to a composition of formal effects, then in genre fiction one can find the true zenith of the literary; the true home of the �diarrheic flow of words� and �lifeless carpentry�. Here is where the effects of verbalism - the uncomprehending repetition of clich� - acts as the antidote to the perilous magic of genuine literary fiction.

Posted on July 6th, 2002.

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