Hatchet Jobs

From the jacket:

The message of this compact philippic has already sent shock waves through contemporary publishing, earning its author brickbats and plaudits of equal intensity.

In these pages, Dale Peck contends that contemporary fiction is at an impasse. Its role as entertainer and educator has been usurped by television while the mainstream book business has become little more than a feeder industry for Hollywood. Faced with such diminished status, novelists have reacted in two understandable, if misguided, ways: writing for targeted socio-cultural groups, they produce so-called identity fiction that employs a neo-Victorian realism and resembles anthropology more than art; or they pursue a self-reflexive postmodernism that can only comment on the real world with a mocking, impotent jest. Both of these attempted solutions are reactionary and self-defeating, leading to books for the few rather than the many, isolating readers instead of bringing them together.

Hatchet Jobs methodically and unapologetically eviscerates such writing. Reviewing the work of Jim Crace, Rick Moody, and Colson Whitehead, Peck casts a withering eye over the publishing climate that fosters so much mediocre work and the critical establishment that rewards it. Sorties into gay and black women’s fiction acknowledge the benefits and limitations of identity fiction, while critiques of Julian Barnes and David Foster Wallace show how twentieth-century literary movements continue to shape fiction for both good and ill.

Never shy of offering a provocative opinion grounded in intelligent and careful reading, Dale Peck hacks away literature’s deadwood in the hope of creating light for a new literary materialism to sprout and grow.

“Who said, ‘My real delight in reviewing is to say nasty things’? No, not who you think. It was Virginia Woolf. Dale peck emboldens and makes me life. I’m grateful for his attention to misogyny in contemporary fiction. He’s often right. The forest needs him.”

— Susan Sontag

“Dale Peck may have an ego the size of Montana. He may have annoyed half the known literary world with his screeds on other writers. But he may also be one of our most adventurous and singularly talented writers working today.”

— David Wiegand