An awful bunch of tantrums, written solely to garner the author some brief attention. I think he's writing teenage vampire sci-fi novels now, which, enough said.

I don't have much patience for pompous blowhards. Pompous blowhard, thy name is Dale Peck.

Are there some valid points made in this book? Yes, some. That being said, I have far more respect when the opinions come from someone who has talent that outshines those who are the subject of the harsh criticism. Peck is not even close. It's as though a man who has crafted an adequate stained glass window turns around and starts screaming at the ghost of Louis Comfort Tiffany for producing "schlock." Sorry, Mr. Peck, but until you achieve the level of artistry as many of the authors you skewer, you don't have the wherewithal to paint yourself as the uber-lord of literature looking down your nose at "middlebrow drivel” that’s “celebrated in excess.”

Peck might better spend his time working on his own craft rather than tearing down the works of others.

Criticism is one thing, but jealous beat downs without backup is something else altogether.

A nasty, boring book in which someone whose talent appears to have sputtered out years previously, attempted to gain some notoriety by taking a hatchet to the work of others.

Sour grapes much, Dale? At least Jonathan Franzen has some talent to back up his obnoxious public persona. With this author there's all the obnoxiousness and very little talent.

I actually share a large number of the opinions that Peck articulates in this book, and I certainly recognize the absolute necessity for this kind of merciless criticism in such a deluded, hype-driven age.  The problem is that Peck doesn't have the credibility to deliver it.
This is not because he is himself a novelist of only mediocre accomplishments--after all, many great critics had no talent for the writing of fiction itself.  It is because he is guilty of the same kind of dubious back-scratching and addle-brained marketing hyperbole that is responsible for the degenerate state of contemporary publishing.
In his blurb for Jonathan Safran Foer's _Everything Is Illuminated_ he writes breathlessly that it is the best first novel ever written.
Excuse me?
Now, let's give Peck the benefit of the doubt that he actually believes this and has good reason to do so, although we know that he is a family friend of the Foers' and works together with Jonathan Safran Foer's brother, Franklin, on the staff of The New Republic.  Yes, let's forget all that.  But has Peck ever heard of _The Tin Drum_ I wonder?  That was a first novel.  So was _Invisible Man_.  So was _Catch-22_.  So was _Buddenbrooks_.  So was _Amerika_ by Kafka.  So was _Wuthering Heights_.  And _Sense and Sensibility_.  This is, of course, to say nothing of _The Tale of Genji_.  The list is long and exceedingly distinguished.
Regardless of what one thinks of _Everything Is Illuminated_ (I personally found it a mixture of cleverness, good intentions, and overweening self-indulgence), to say that it is the best first novel ever written is to say something stupid and irresponsible.  Such a statement can only be the product of favoritism or abysmal ignorance--neither of which are qualities I value in a literary critic.  When he then goes on to call Rick Moody the "worst writer of his generation" in this book, he demolishes his credibility entirely.  Rick Moody is an uneven writer who has written some halfway-decent books.  The "worst writer of his generation"?  No.  That is called "writing for effect."  I do not read critics for their pathetic attempts at effect (and exaggeration is the cheapest, most witless form of such)--I read them to find a model of how to be an intelligent, sensitive, and yes, sometimes dismissive, reader.  I do not read them to chortle over how much they resemble Fox News commentators.  We have enough of that in our society.  Too much, in fact.
In order for a critic to earn the right to launch such withering frontal assaults on people who are merely trying to practice their craft, he must demonstrate that he can not only tell good from bad from mediocre, but also that he can tell the great from the "almost-great" and the "merely good."  AT THE VERY LEAST, he must desist from the corrupt game of writing meaninglessly effusive blurbs for his friends.

Peck's systemic dismantling of pop-literature can feel cruel but also comes from a place of love - maybe not for his fellow authors, but language itself.

I remember the moment when I decided that Dale Peck didn't deserve my attention.  At the end of a review of a Julian Barnes novel, he said that modern British writing was awful, and then spent a single paragraph naming various writers and insulting them.  Ian McEwan's novels stink like old fish, etc.  He didn't bother explaining to the reader why he thought this was so: he just made a list and said, these people are bad.

And in review after review, this is his favorite way of working.  With the exception of his review of Rick Moody's The Black Veil, which is a legitimate dismantling of a bad book, Peck almost never goes into detail as to why a book isn't worth reading.  He just throws around insults.  There's nothing wrong with writing a vicious review, but back it up: quote examples, explain why the book is badly written, poorly constructed, unrealistic, anything.  A responsible critic like James Wood takes the trouble to do this.

But all we get from Peck are strings of denunciations: "All I'm suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid--just plain stupid--tomes of DeLillo."

If you agree with Peck, then this isn't really illuminating; but if you don't - and think that, let's say, plenty of Barth is not "ridiculous dithering" - then this is useless to you, because Peck doesn't bother defending his claims.  That these writers are awful strikes him as self-evident; all he needs to do is say it, and maybe with a writerly flourish, like the bit about a sidewalk cracking under the weight of someone's stupidity.

But clearly, since these writers are not already forgotten, their worthlessness is not self-evident.  And if you want to take them apart you have to do it patiently, using analysis instead of playground taunts.  BR Myers, for example, also wrote an article that was a rant against the state of modern writing, and went after both Moody and DeLillo, but he took the time to quote sections of prose, and slowly built up his case.  It was clear that he had read their books carefully.  One wouldn't even have to read the books in question to write some of Peck's reviews: just say "incomprehensible ramblings" and call it a day.

Peck delivers these insults with a great deal of passion, and appears to want to set himself up as some sort of conscience of literature, calling for a return to the authentic.  But it's unclear just what he wants, especially when he produces lines like this: "But only after a work of literature has accepted its own failure--has, as it were, elegized its stillborn self--can it begin the complex series of contextual manipulations by which meaning is created and we locate ourselves as surely as the ancient navigators fixed their positions between stars."

Ah yes, that complex series of manipulations.  I for one, unlike the ancient navigators, am having trouble locating myself in that sentence, but Peck would probably say that I am merely an idiot.  He then goes on to say "Contemporary novels have either counterfeited reality or forfeited it. In their stead we need a new materialism."  This is his positive program.  Great: come on writers, get on that!  Start working on that new materialism.

I don't think Peck is dishonest; he seems to mean these things that he says.  He is merely lazy, and won't bother to tell us why he thinks so - and, more importantly, why we should think so too.  Don't waste your time on him.