Over at The Millions site, Garth Risk Hallberg administers a comprehensive whipping of criticism's most notorious pleasure-killing machine, B.R. Myers, author of A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American LIterary Culture and The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Myers may be a skilled interpreter of North Korean political culture, but he’s a one-man North Korea of literary sensibility. His primary bête noire is anything he deems postmodernist, and he beats on it like Camille Paglia humping a Madonna mannequin. You can discern both the style of his wooden invidiousness and the substance of his captious manifesto in a sample sentence like this one: “I would also rather join the reactionaries than those who want to reduce the printed sentence to an elongated Rorschach blot.” The only thing I regret about Hallberg’s counterstrike is his pinning it largely on a defense of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom against the perfidy of Myers’ recent review in the Atlantic; you don’t have to love the Franzen to have the Myers make your skin crawl. It's not really about the targets that Myers chooses (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLilo, Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer), the narrow shelf of writers he's admired (John le Carré, and no one else I can recall at the moment), or the crabbed virtues he dimly champions. His disapprobation and praise amount to the same thing, a vivid instance of the malady that Samuel Johnson called “the general conspiracy against contemporary merit.”
Photograph of B.R. Myers courtesy of Seoul Rotary Club
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