Epitaph, not manifesto… Middle-aged women have transformed contemporary literature into a conveyor belt of dreck.  This is not a random slur – look at what is lauded as the superlative writing today and you will find books filled with menopausal obsessions, chatter about the mundane, shallow cultural tourism, bulk rate epiphanies, pseudo-spiritual profundities, and page after page of writing that is as lost in itself as its readers are – the sort of thing women take comfort in once they've dried up.  The gray, meat-like material that is the modern novel is processed in such massive quantity that it prefigures the threat of nanotechnology to wipe out all human existence; this gray literature has wiped out novels, poetry, and plays as forms of any significance.  Because the machinery of publicity demands that someone sing its praises, we have the new critic:  the man (or, more frequently, woman) who writes clich้s about clich้s – everything he reads, or everything by authors of a certain reputation, is lyrical, elegaic, transfiguring, transcendent.  He constantly announces that he is astonished, startled, and punched in the gut by the reams of self-conscious prose, although because he is always acting astonished, and because he never compares anything to anything else, it is difficult to conclude that he believes what he is saying.  Or, English major that he is, knows what he is saying.

There is the lowbrow stuff, which everyone ignores as the dimwitted, unaspiring trash that it is.  All those genre hacks, many of whom may no longer even do their own writing, are meant to be read by frequent fliers and so are beneath notice.  Then there is the highbrow literature.  But it is not.  You can tell immediately from its ornate metaphors, its amorphous metaphysical jargon, its fussy punctuation, and its "a writer was here" wordplay that it is intended to be complicated and confusing, that is to say it is written for middlebrow readers who associate the complex and the vague with greatness (all the subjects they did poorly in at school left them in a fog).  If you don't have to work at art, how do you know it is any good?  How do you know it is challenging?  For one must be challenged; this is a part of the self-improvement lifestyle that requires art to perform the same function as a treadmill or stair climber.

If you have to read it twice or three times, so thinks the middlebrow, it must be good.   This was Toni Morrison's excuse when Oprah Winfrey mentioned (as praise) how difficult her writing was to digest.  Formerly this would have indicated the writer had failed to communicate his meaning clearly.  But the middlebrow always wants a definite indication that he is getting the benefit out of something.  For him the rote exercise of re-reading an awkward passage until he has mechanically realized the intended effect is proof that his brain has just grown slightly bigger.

A Reader's Manifesto by B. R. Myers is "an attack on the growing pretentiousness in literary prose", singling out just one element of what makes modern literature so unreadable.  It came out in 2002, preceded by a shortened version in The Atlantic Monthly, and duly raised a minor furor in literary circles.  In it Myers examines five much-lauded contemporary writers and wonders why their prose is given any credit at all.

Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller.  Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read, Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie.  Give me anything, in fact, as long as it isn't just the latest must-read novel, complete with a prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of precious raves on the back.  In the bookstore I'll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose – "furious dabs of tulips stuttering," say, or "in the dark before the day yet was" – and I'm hightailing it to the friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics.

At first I was not sure I would be up to the task of reading Myers' manifesto – the subject of modern literature's shortcomings is depressing to think about – however Myers, unlike his subjects, writes intelligently and clearly, and the book (which is by no means overlong) is such an enjoyable light read that I finished it in one evening.  At last, someone has pointed out how empty all the pretension really is, and from the desire to read better, not merely plainer, fiction.

Our "literary" writers aren't expected to evince much in the way of brain power.  Musing about consumerism, bandying about words like "ontological," chanting Red River hokum as if it were a lost book of the Old Testament:  this is what passes for intellectual content today.  Nor do writers need a poet's sensibility or sharp eye.  It is the departure from natural speech that counts, not what, if anything, is being arrived at.  A sufficiently obtrusive idiom can even induce critics to overlook the sin of a strong plot.  Conversely, though more rarely, a concise prose style can be pardoned if a novel's pace is slow enough, as was the case with Ha Jin's aptly titled Waiting, which won the National Book Award in 1999.

You have probably experienced, if you have attempted to read one of these Pulitzered or National Book Awarded treasures of our great novelists, what Myers calls their obtrusive idioms.  The writers always seem to be going for some impressionistic effect, sometimes merely listing an array of synonyms as if judiciously choosing from among them is impossible.  He quotes a passage written by Annie Proulx:

The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover.

This is not highbrow writing, it is poor writing – comically poor.  Nothing is furthered by jumbling three distinct and unrelated images together, it is only more work for the reader to make sense out of what he is reading.  The bit about the pencil is so out of place that one wonders if Proulx, fumbling for another simile so that she would have three of them, looked down and noticed the writing implement she was holding.  That will do!

Myers observes that the inept prose of these writers is infectious – the critics who praise it often unconsciously mimic its badness:

Birds, building materials, and human body parts are equal grist to Ms. Proulx's language mill, which grinds brilliant prose out of them all.

One is quite taken aback by the notion that brilliant prose is ground out of a mill like so much lumber (to say nothing of a mill into which one inserts poor little birds and "human body parts").  An off day for The New York Times' Walter Kendrick, perhaps.  He might enjoy my metaphor for literature as gray goo.

Taking on his next subject, Don DeLillo, Myers comments on how easy it has become to seem edgy, simply by providing long lists of consumer items.

You don't have to have read anything published after 1960 to know at once what you're in for:  a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.  Critics like to call this kind of thing "edgy" writing, though how an edge can be discerned after fifty years of blunting is anyone's guess.  This will always be foolproof subject matter for a novelist of limited gifts.  If you found the above shopping list witty, then DeLillo's your man.  If you complain that it's just dull, and that you got the joke about a quarter of the way through, he can always counter by saying, "Hey, I don't make the all-inclusive, consumption-mad society, I just report on it."  You get the idea.

DeLillo is one of those writers who thinks he has stumbled upon the secrets of the pyramids when he compares supermarkets to churches, as if this tired and actually quite stupid comparison is in any way insightful or daring.  College freshmen think like this.

There is more in Myers' excellent essay.  But the best and most amusing part of this book is the epilogue, in which Myers responds to critics of his manifesto.  Who are these critics?  Of course they are fixtures of the current literary establishment, people who actually like the writings of DeLillo and Proulx and Morrison.  They include Lee Siegel, recently released from The New Republic for sock-puppeting in the comments of his own weblog (dear, dear), Meghan O'Rourke, a Slate writer who would shit stupidly if it were at all possible, and Judith Shulevitz, another Slate alum who seems uniquely qualified either as writer for The New York Times Book Review or as the principal character in a three act play about the plight of morons.

Myers is a cruel man, and so quotes them at length.  Shulevitz comes off as a battered critic who stands by her man the moment police officers arrive.  "Hating indiscriminately is a greater sin than loving too much," she chirps after noting the eye-rolling vulgarity (her words) of these writers, through which "we also get to love them."  Shulevitz should know from eye-rolling.  But Myers' criticism is the opposite of indiscriminate – he takes pains to quote not only representative samples from these writers, but particularly the passages that have been held up by the critics as especially sublime.  What Shulevitz is really saying is that the literary establishment's favorites are off-limits, although she is unable to articulate why.  (She seems more fascinated by the fact that Myers lives in New Mexico – as if her shallowness needed underscoring.)

O'Rourke simply indulges her habit of obtusely misrepresenting the argument:  "At the heart of Myers' screed is an implied conflict between 'story' and 'style': a notion that story trumps style, or that it ought to right now, since we've come to overvalue arty writing."  This is of course completely wrong; Myers' argument is that the writers in question are incompetent stylists who ham-fistedly shove metaphors and wordplay up the cracks of their books like stuffing into an underfed turkey.  "At the heart of his complaints is a buried anxiety about cultural elitism, a peculiarly American distrust of showiness and artiness."  O'Rourke then goes on to blame reviewers for being inattentive to the philistines who want a "fun read" (she seems to think this has anything to do with Myers' complaints), and suggests that their creative writing classes have made them too refined, too preoccupied with "emotional truths".  Given the poetry she has published in Slate, it must be a great solace for O'Rourke to think that a few more creative writing classes are all she needs.  (She can't even get her condescension straight – she also claims that the writers Myers lambastes fell out of favor ages ago, and that he's slow to notice that no one likes them anymore – betraying her fixation on the trendy New York literary scene.)

O'Rourke is hopelessly wrong here too – the writers Myers' examines have had  successful careers precisely because middlebrow readers think the fumbling wordplay is meant to challenge them – they don't know what art is but they know what makes them dizzy.  The middle class, middle-aged housewives who buy this Oprah-approved drivel* are not my idea of a cultural elite, nor are the half-witted critic-writers who logroll each other's books for fear of getting a bad notice or seeming out of step with current fashion.  Proulx and DeLillo are no deeper or more challenging to read than Crichton or Clancy, and are about as artistically satisfying.

Particularly shameful is how easy O'Rourke and her ilk are to impress with nonsensical wordflow and puncutation gimmicks.  The cultural elite of yesteryear have been replaced by semi-literate liberal arts majors who wouldn't know a mixed metaphor if you shoved them head first into a salad blender with a copy of Webster's Unabridged (as much as one would like to).  They read everything for mood and atmosphere and cannot articulate what about this stuff impresses them – which is to say, as critics they are failures.

Indeed, one has only to glance through the latest "cultural elite" book reviews to experience the poverty and tedium of what passes for literary discussion.  I would rather take instruction in artistic principles from a dentist, and how very like the bland medical professional these critics are (some might ask what I have against dentists).  One can readily find examples of superb literary criticism of the past, whereas today it's all a mush of incoherent slobbering and empty praise.  To take at random the opening paragraph of a recent New York Times book review by Paul Gray:

Over the course of her five previous novels, Alice McDermott has staked an impressive claim on a subject matter and a turf — Irish-American Catholic families congregated, for the most part, in New York City and its suburbs on Long Island. The Irish have, of course, long been a significant presence in American fiction, appearing well before the mass immigration of the late 19th century (think of "Huckleberry Finn"), and the novels, notably, of William Kennedy attest to the subject's continuing strength. McDermott adds her own luster to this seemingly familiar community through her skill at evoking small, memorable incidents and her willingness to ignore certain narrative conventions.

Have you ever seen a "luster" described in such unrelentingly drab and banal terms ("impressive claim", "signficant presence", "continuing strength", "small, memorable incidents", "narrative conventions")?  But Gray is writing on critical autopilot, throwing words into his review-o-matic while apparently thinking about something else entirely (perhaps a book proposal for a critical examination of Irish-American Catholic families in literature).  After quoting a few completely ordinary sentences and before spending the rest of his review merely providing a synopsis of the plot (as if he were writing a third grade book report), Gray gushes, "This sequence could stand alone as a classic short story in the Joycean, epiphanic mode: an accretion of humdrum moments that gather force and blossom into the transfiguration of a life."  Indeed one of the worst things about Joyce is that he ushered in such existential twaddle – where epiphanies come every time you pick up your dry cleaning or blow your nose.  Gray seems to be hoping the accretion of his metaphors do something also…take wing and fly off the page, perhaps.

What can one do?  Sadly, probably nothing.  We have entered a post-literary age – an age in which even schools consider reading to be tough work best left for college or perhaps graduate school.  Like an extension of the gray goo in literature, the Internet is crushing the language down into a gutter syntax of emoticons, trendy expressions, and crudely expressed vehemence – middlebrow-speak.  Our modern novelists can work with that, too.  To those who love literature:  stick to libraries, at least until computers take over there as well.**