Massachusetts Reviews: Fire the Bastards!
- By Gary Amdahl
Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards! (Dalkey Archive Press, 1992) was first published by the author, in the author’s magazine newspaper (no caps, and the italics are mine), in 1962. The text was written on a typewriter (again, no caps, very little in the way of punctuation, extra spaces between sentences) mimeographed, and stapled. It’s hard to imagine that such a homely production had any currency at all, but it did, with Gilbert Sorrentino and David Markson attesting on the back of the DAP edition to its widespread availability in Greenwich Village, in bookshops and coffeehouses, and its popularity with readers who did not feel themselves the least bit marginal, or even out of the mainstream. The only operative, effective distinction in Green’s literary world was between bestsellers and real books, and his complaint was not that the subject of his book, reviewers and their reviews of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, were too few and far between, or treated the novel as something perhaps avant garde, or specialized, or in some other way exclusive and therefore of minimal interest to general readers, but that the reviewers were too lazy or stupid to do justice to a book—a work of art—they thought was too difficult to deal with.
I got my copy of Fire the Bastards! directly from its editor at DAP, Gaddis scholar Steven Moore. I got it on the strength of a review I’d written of Gaddis’s last novel, A Frolic of His Own, in 1994 in The Hungry Mind Review. HMR was almost on a level with Green’s newspaper. It was funded by one of the country’s flagship independent bookstores, and distributed free of charge to other independents. We had subscribers, and sold single copies as well. Though I’d gotten letters about other reviews I’d written, I was quite surprised and truly thrilled to be read and taken seriously on the level Moore represented. We were, in the words of Dwight Garner (more of Garner later), so unhip we were hip.
I had been in Cornell’s MFA program for one semester, the fall of 1986, leaving a wonderful situation (full ride, stipend, job, house on Lake Cayuga complete with dinghy) because I couldn’t for the life of me understand how the group could conceivably help me write a novel, nor how I could help the others do the same. But not before a meeting took place that has burned like an endless candle in my mind ever since. MFA faculty and students were there, along with some profs and grad students from the English department and some other interested persons from around the campus, and the question was: which writers shall we invite to speak to us? Someone suggested John Irving.
And was hooted down, if not exactly roundly booed. Irving was considered a bestseller sort of author—a good one, to be sure, of the kind that occasionally appeared on the New York Times list, but not a serious literary author of the kind we assumed we all were, or wanted to be, and certainly not the kind of author we wanted to speak to us. Lorrie Moore, a year or two ahead of me, could speak to this ethos, but surely would not, given her place in the night sky, as could Julie Schumacher, also a year ahead, who wrote a gentle spoof about college creative writing programs recently that, far from endangering the writer’s position in her community, positively enhances it. Likewise Melissa Bank, in my class, who went on to simply write a bestseller. That was nevertheless a clear and explicit plank in our platform.
Consequently one of the things I noticed right away in (Steven) Moore’s Introduction to Fire the Bastards! was a reference to that very distinction. Noting how much had changed since 1962, Moore wrote (in 1992, remember) that “there is now a field-wide tendency to ignore literary fiction in favor of mainstream books. New product by the likes of Stephen King or Danielle Steele is now reviewed where in the past they would have been passed over in silence.”
It’s hard to imagine Stephen King and John Irving being summarily dismissed now, but I didn’t blink then. King was a genre writer and genre fiction of all kinds bored me instantly and deeply, and while I’d liked The World According to Garp when it came out in 1978, I’d immediately outgrown it. I was not only an enthusiast of Gaddis (and Gass and Barth and Barthelme and Coover and Hawkes and Elkin and Pynchon), I was not a bastard whose firing Jack Green would have demanded. I had also published fiction in Fiction, a magazine with which Barthelme and Pynchon were associated. I thought I had not only survived my reckless abandonment of the Cornell MFA program, I was thriving.
My next piece for HMR was “The State of American Fiction.”
An illustration accompanied the piece, a woodcut print by the late Andy Nelson of the United States, with icons for three types of fiction jammed all over it. One of those icons, the one for “Mr. Coffee® Minimalism” appeared to have been placed directly over Normal, Illinois, where DAP has its offices. (The other two icons were a bubbling test tube for “Experimental” and a rocking chair for “Safe and Boring.”) To make a short, tedious story shorter and less tedious, Moore wrote me an angry letter, demanding to know how I could possibly think DAP could be a hot-bed of Mr. Coffee Minimalism. I wrote back saying that was the last thing I thought, that the icons had been placed randomly, were chockablock on the map, and bore no relation whatsoever to any reality, geographical or literary, that could be imagined. I said the map was supposed to be funny. Nevertheless, he asked me to return Fire the Bastards! along with the other two books he’d sent me, books he’d written on Gaddis: I didn’t deserve them.
I moved to Connecticut, and started reviewing for the Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Nation (under John Leonard with A. O. Scott and Dwight Garner), NYTBR, and elsewhere, determined not to be a bastard. I was even more determined to make my reviews worthy as I’d found myself unable, after placing work in The Quarterly and Fiction, to publish creative work. In 1996, I wrote two of the four reviews that helped pluck Gina Berriault’s Women in Their Beds from the obscurity the bastards had consigned her to, and she eventually won both the NBCC and PEN Faulkner for it. Also that year, Dwight Garner hired me to review books at the brand new Salon. My first book was Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State. Not being a bastard, I said it was a half-assed novel by a celebrity. Garner said he wasn’t going to run the review. He said he would pay me, but he wasn’t going to run it. I asked him why not. He said it was because I had given it a bad review. I said that was because I thought it was a bad novel. He said he understood, and that it was his fault. How so? I asked. “I should have hired a Hawke-head,” he said. “What’s a Hawke-head?” I asked. “Someone who likes Ethan Hawke.”
After a stint ghostwriting reviews for Elle, where I was told that the most important rule of thumb was to find out what everybody else was thinking, I hung it up.
It’s not the bastards who get fired.
That’s not all he wrote, however. The curtain for a breathtakingly rancorous, stupendously death- and America-defying Act Two rises in January of the present year, when my novel The Daredevils gets its first and last review: an adulatory blurb in a column of “much anticipated books,” along with Emma Cline’s The Girls. The two novels were also included in a regular comedy video feature called “Judging Books by their Covers.”
I probably would not have noticed how well The Girls was doing if A) I hadn’t seen that video in January, and B) if The Daredevils had been reviewed—even once. But I began to notice, and remember, and wonder. What would cause The Girls to be reviewed everywhere and The Daredevils nowhere?
My first response was to write about Jack Green’s book, with the above. The editor of the regular feature for which it seemed ideally suited turned out to be—wait for it—a Hawke-head. So I began reading reviews of The Girls.
The novel is being almost unanimously described as astonishingly well written, "fast-tracked by the Muses," (James Wood), “mesmerizing,” (Dwight Garner), and on and on and on. James Wood thinks this is “finely intelligent, superbly written, with flashingly brilliant sentnences” (New Yorker). Diane Johnson thinks it “teems with startling descriptions…that are often wonderful” (NYRB). Most of the book's reviewers don't seem to be literary critics (The Atlantic's reviewer was their Health editor), but surely Wood and Johnson have read other books! They sound like they're encouraging their children or the children of their friends, or grandchildren, in their storytelling craft homework. All I can see is "creative writing" of the most superficial kind, colorful turns of phrase that would be praised by my students who are taking the class because they have to have a semester of creative process, and who think all there is to creative writing is creative writing—or students in a Trump U style MFA program; i.e., those who think glitz and glitter is all there is, or their older-money friends in the better literary clubs who know fashion is the best tuition.
If I hadn't just read the London Review of Book's review, I would think I was just stamping my foot into the ground of miserable old age, but there it is called what it is: puerile nonsense.
Because Garner was an “old friend,” I wrote to him telling him he was a dude easily mesmerized. Friends in publicity instantly wrote me off, telling me I would be blacklisted at NYT—a warning you have to join me in guffawing at. How would I ever know? I was also told that if my letter ever got round to any of the independent presses, I would be blacklisted there as well.
You will join me in ceasing to laugh and thinking, That is fucking chilling.
This is utter collapse. Not only is there no longer any distinction being made between bestsellers and serious literary fiction for adults, the gatekeepers aren’t even bothering anymore with Laura Miller’s bizarre “bestseller” and “prestige” categories. I would say we are in the grip of a hegemonic force if that force didn’t also seem very much like an economic bubble: this is subprime literature. And we’re not just talking about book reviewing here: journalists who want access have to self censor, and the NYT has to defend itself against accusations of “false balance” (e.g. between Trump and Clinton scandal reporting) by saying If we report the news we will be accused of moralizing and offering our opinions instead if facts. Fire the bastards.
----
Gary Amdahl is the author, most recently, of a novel, The Daredevils, and a play, Dharma Comes to Dinner.
