Dear Readers:
Dr. Ink has had a rare literary experience that he must share with his faithful readers. It began a few short years ago when his friend Tom French gave him as a gift a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “All the Pretty Horses.” The Doc tried his best but found the book all but unreadable. The same happened with three other American novelists of high reputation: Annie Proulx (“The Shipping News”), David Guterson (“Snow Falling on Cedars”), and Don DeLillo (“Underworld”). In each case, Dr. Ink began these novels with high expectations, only to abandon them.
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Then along rides a champion of the reader in the form of one B.R. Myers. His essay in the Atlantic has grown into a small book titled “A Reader’s Manifesto.” The subtitle describes the work as “an attack on the growing pretentiousness in American literary prose.” Myers’ argument has been denounced by the literary establishment with such vehemence that one feels there must be some truth to it. As they say, “Only a kicked dog yowls.”
Myers himself is a bit of a mystery man. The child of a peripatetic army family, Myers was raised in Bermuda, South Africa, and Germany. He is the only American-born scholar Doc has heard of who teaches North Korean studies in South Korea. No doubt, this unusual background contributed to the sense of his being an upstart, an unworthy messenger for the bad news he was delivering.
Through close readings of contemporary texts, Myers concludes that Stephen King is a better writer than the likes of McCarthy, Guterson, DeLillo, and Proulx. His indictment of these writers is that they are too self-consciously literary, too enamored of their own images, too pretentiously poetic at the sake of the reader’s understanding.
This passage from “Accordion Crimes” by Annie Proulx is typical of the kind of writing that irritates Myers’ contrary sensibilities: “She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the wood of the barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet and driven sand, the unconcerned swallows daring and reappearing with insects clasped in their beaks looking like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank windows of the house, the old glass casting blue swirled reflections at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her stumped arms, even, in the firm moment, hearing the wet thuds of her forearms against the barn and the bright sound of the metal striking.”
According to Myers, someone needs to tell Proulx “that half of good writing is knowing what to leave out.”
“A Reader’s Manifesto” concludes with “Ten Rules for ‘Serious’ Writers.” They nicely summarize the Myers critique of contemporary literature:
- Be Writerly: “If it sounds clear and natural, strike it out.”
- Sprawl.
- Equivocate.
- Mystify.
- Keep Sentences Long.
- Repeat Yourself.
- Pile on the Imagery.
- Archaize.
- Bore.
- Play the Part.
Myers’ diatribe is not an attack on texts that challenge the reader. Joyce or Conrad or Faulkner remain standing. Nor does Myers exercise counter-intuition for its own sake. Instead, he reminds us of a great American aesthetic of plainness, clarity, and direct meaning that infuse the souls of our best writers, literary and journalistic.
