Literary Claptrap

A blogger on the Huffington Post recently published his list of the fifteen most overrated American writers. The blogger is a writer, of course, not very well known. But a  few months ago I read and reviewed his one book of fiction, a collection of short stories, for a new international literary journal. The publisher's blurb promised "eleven stories of novelistic breadth and ambition, global tensions and harmonies come alive as rarely seen in contemporary fiction."

You know what it's like when you play tennis with a strong partner, or get involved in a heated discussion with an obviously intelligent and articulate friend or dinner party guest? Well this was nothing like that. This particular writer is clearly an intelligent and learned man. I didn't even disagree with some of the smarmy criticism he spewed in his Huff Post piece. But I found his own fiction pretty much unreadable. Had I bought his book to read for pleasure I never would have got past the second story.

  

If I hadn't read 240 pages of his pretentious drivel I might be able to appreciate the irony of his essay, in which he moans about the meaninglessness of MFA programs and thier intellectual tie-in to the reviewing establishment and literary awards panels. He trashes John Ashberry and Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham and WIlliam Vollman. Jhumpa Lahiri, he says, is "determined to shun any stylistic influences besides Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant."  Junot Diaz is an uber-nerd who “desperately tries to establish his street/ghetto cred." He goes on and on, for 15 pages, making some valid points (too boring to go over here).  For the record, I do have an MFA, but am not part of what he calls the reviewing establishment.  I have admired the work of most of those on his list since they came onto the literary scene, though I was unable to meaningfully critique or analyze any of it before I started graduate school.

Very few critics have the talent to actually practice the art they criticize, and that's as it should be. It's almost a cliche to say that new media is changing the way we read and think about reading, but it's true. So I'm wondering why this guy has such a prominent place in one of the more visible outposts of the Internet. And if he can do it with multisyllabic whining and uber-intellectual insults, does it matter that he can't write a single story that didn't make me want to toss his book in the recycling bin?