Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature

In these essays Peck rightly eviscerates contemporary "bombastic and befuddled" literary novelists who have defined and adhere to "a tradition that has grown increasingly esoteric and exclusionary, falsely intellectual and alienating to the mass of readers." He excoriates the McSweeney's crowd and "the ridiculous dithering of John Barth ... [and] the reductive cardboard constructions of Donald Barthelme," and would excise from the modern canon "nearly all of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo," and — while he's at it — "the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses ... the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of late Nabokov." He correctly maintains that in writing "for one another rather than some more or less common reader," these writers have created a situation in which "the members of the educated bourgeoisie ... are sick and tired of feeling like they've somehow failed the modern novel." In his meticulous attention to diction, his savage wit, his exact and rollicking prose, his fierce devotion to stylistic and intellectual precision, and — of course — his disdain for pseudo-intellectual flatulence, Peck is Mencken's heir (although he's got to curb his lazy use of expletives). He writes that this collection marks the end of his hatchet jobs. For the sake of the republic of letters, he'd better change his mind.

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