A defense of snark
August 30, 2004 | Comments Off
Opinion by Emma Garman
In his New York Times review of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Tom Bissell observes that “ambition is written in magma across this novel’s every page. But ‘Cloud Atlas’ is the sort of book that makes ambition seem slightly suspect.” This put me in mind of Heidi Julavits’ lament (you know where, or as Old Hag so memorably put it last year, Ctrl + F3 on Windows) that “ambition is not the sort of thing that American critics are terribly partial to.” Julavits, to be fair, provided her own special definition of ambition as overreaching, and her point was that she didn’t want authors – delicate flowers that they are – to be deterred from reaching high.
This whole issue – of how “critical” book critics should be – has been given fresh steam with the publication of Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs, the content of which gets people surprisingly riled up. Surprisingly to me, that is, because in the UK it is accepted that book reviews are entertainment like anything else. No one suggested that the inimitable Zoe Williams had mother issues when her New Statesman review of Helen Fielding’s Oliver Joules and the Overactive Imagination began thus:
In her opening acknowledgements, Helen Fielding’s thanks go “above all to Kevin Curran for his enormous contribution in terms of plotting, character, jokes, ideas”. I don’t know who this guy is, but I’d be happy to represent him on a no-win, no fee basis if he wants to sue her for defamation.
Is this snark? I don’t care, because it makes me laugh and tells me what I need to know: that the book in question is not worth reading. As does, to take just one example, Peck’s description of the 1079 page Infinite Jest as “one of the very few novels for which the phrase ‘not worth the paper it’s printed on’ has real meaning in at least an ecological sense.” To be amused by a review in this way means that I take its message more, rather than less, seriously because I view sharp wit as one of the markers of a fine mind.
Probably, though, if Peck eviscerated commercial fiction, no one would care: it’s because he takes on “literature” that people get upset. At least that’s what I got from John Leonard’s pompous reference to “a community of letters” in his New York Times review of Hatchet Jobs and from Julavits’ strangely incoherent manifesto which seems to equate snarkiness with attacking the institution of literature itself: the contemporary critic who receives unreserved endorsement is Daniel Mendelsohn (“a classicist, a trained one” – God forbid we might think him an amateur one) who, because free of snark, “manifestly cares about literature.”
But isn’t it especially important that the flaws and failings of serious novels are highlighted? Julavits is vaguely preoccupied with “value systems” and “higher ideals” as if invoking a largely unspecified code inhibiting reviewers’ nasty comments will serve some hazy moral purpose. But the only purpose relevant in the debate is: how can better books be published and succeed in the marketplace? Tibor Fischer recently told an anecdote about how a prestigious agent wagered that he could pull any manuscript out of the slush pile and strike a lucrative deal for its author. He did exactly that. This didn’t shock me: I’ve seen first-hand the operation of Fischer’s former agent, a.k.a. the mighty novel-selling machine Andrew Wylie, and recall in particular an instance when publishers around the globe were alerted to the existence of a young woman’s first novel, for which they were requested (it was more instructed), to submit their offers by a certain time on a certain day.
Regardless of the novel’s merit – it was only moderately accomplished, in my opinion – they all offered huge sums. Such is the power of a famous agent, and as we all know this is just one of the variables, unrelated to a novel’s quality, on which success can depend. The result: the chance that any novel you pick up in a bookstore will actually be any good is almost completely random.
So, while I think that entertainingly informing readers is snark’s raison d’etre, I also believe that the boldly negative critique may be the only weapon available for stemming the tide of mediocre writing offered by the corrupt book publishing industry and its shadowy ally, the creative writing program. And the only supposed threat it poses, according to Julavits, is that of dampening ambition through fear, resulting in less exciting work. To this I can only say that if “ambition” serves as euphemism for hyper-intellectual, emotionally unengaging, contrivedly inventive or experimental narratives, such as those James Wood has termed hysterical realism, then this wouldn’t be to our culture’s detriment. Too often these kind of novels are so divorced from accurate depictions of reality that they fail to provide what Stephen Pinker has theorised as the cognitive advantage – and therefore genuine pleasure – of masterful fiction: experiencing, via the enchantment of a story, how relatable, hypothetical scenarios play out.
But who cares about offering pleasure when you can advertise your immense knowledge and cleverness? Bissell (whose measured and intelligent review of Cloud Atlas is in itself unrelated to my points here, as is David Mitchell’s work: it just so happens that the piece raises such relevant issues) remarks of an author’s urge to write a deliberately difficult book:
This urge does not necessarily result in novels with nameless characters, mutating typography or unpunctuated attempts to explore the aphotic realm of human consciousness. It is also not an urge unique to modernism or experimentalism.
Yet it was modernism, if we agree with Oxford scholar and 2003 Booker Prize chair John Carey, that came about largely as a result of certain authors making a concerted, deliberate effort to demonstrate their intellectual superiority to the newly literate common man. I can’t help feeling that our modern equivalent to this is the trend for novels untempered by the conventional wisdom offered to the budding writer: you don’t have to include everything you know! In our information-overload society, where everyone has access to knowledge on an wildly unprecedented scale, what better way to stand out from the crowd than with, as Wood put it in his post-9/11 Guardian article, “books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being“? And what better way to reverse this unfortunate cultural tendency than with a a stinging dose of snark?
(Please note that this post is the Guest Opinion of Emma Garman.)