Is the Novel dead?

The modern novel has been killed, according to critic Dale Peck, in his essay collection aptly entitled Hatchet jobs. The culprits: James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, along with their followers. The current crop of bad novelists, Peck says, includes David Foster Wallace, Jim Crace, and "the worse writer of his generation," Rick Moody.

 Hatchet Jobs includes Peck's reviews of such notable recent works as Philip Roth's American Pastoral, Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days, and Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back. He hates them all. In fact, the only positive reviews in the book are of Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake and Rebecca Brown's Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary.

In a brief afterward, Peck explains his own philosphical approach. "Fiction is like dance: it's susceptible to the egos of its practitioners. Bad writers can't do it much damage because they'll simply be ignored, but a self-indulgent writer with a single compelling skill can do incalculable harm." It is because the writers whose work he pans have some talent, or what he sees as "an authentic gift," that he reviews them so harshly. "These novels aren't bad," he says. "They just aren't novels. They aren't art." On the other hand, he describes Stanley Crouch's Don't the Moon Look Lonesome as "a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed, and put forward in bad faith."

Whether one agrees with Dale Peck's assessments or not, this volume of negative reviews (punctuated by a pair of glowing reviews as evidence that the author does occasionally find something new worth reading) provides some insight into the mind of a critic and the standards he applies to the novels he reads.

[Hatchet Jobs, by Dale Peck, was published in 2004 by The New Press; isbn 1-56584-874-8]