Snakes and Words
The world is getting worse. I'll tell you how I know: scientists have found a snake that actually rips its prey to pieces. I thought the mosquitos in my yard were bad, and that's true, but this is worse.
This is one of my favorite pieces of writing lately. I have signed up for the Powell's newsletter, which is irritating, and I believe I will stop it soon - but I have also been receiving the Review-a-Day mailing, which is great. That's where I found this, and it's what a review should be. It's about the book itself, not about the subject of the book, which about 1 out of 5 reviews that come to my inbox through this list seem to not get. There's nothing worse than reading someone's summary of a book, unless it's listening to someone's summary of a movie. Or having a snake rip you to pieces before it eats you.
[Update, May 29, 2004: I have now learned my lesson about simply linking to something I like and not retaining the text. Damn New Republic, trying to make money in a capitalist economy! Here are my favorite bits of the review of Rick Moody's The Black Veil by Dale Peck, as stored at Powell's.]
Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation. I apologize for the abruptness of this declaration, its lack of nuance, of any meaning besides the intuitive; but as I made my way through Moody's oeuvre during the past few months I was unable to come up with any other starting point for a consideration of his accomplishment. Or, more accurately, every other starting point that I tried felt disingenuous, nothing more than a way of setting Moody up in order to knock him down. One of those starting points was this: "Rick Moody is a lot of things, but he is not actually dumb." This was an attempt at charity, and though I still think that it's true enough, I don't think that it matters; at any rate, his intelligence does not make up for the badness of his books.
My gut feeling is that if you honestly do not believe that this is bad writing, then you are a part of the problem. When I finished The Black Veil I scrawled "Lies! Lies! All lies!" on the cover and considered my job done.
