Robert MacFarlane is apparently aiming to be the next Dale Peck. He's made a fatal blunder, though. Peck made his reputation as the literary world's preeminent hatchet man with "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," an opening damnation that has everything: it's short, easily memorable, and carries the weight of objective judgment. It will appear in Moody's obituary.
MacFarlane has the advantage of publishing in the New York Times, as opposed to the New Republic. But his opening gambit misses the mark: too long to remember, explicitly wedded to the reviewer's subjective experience, and lacking a famous name on which to hang itself in the cultural memory. Here we go:
Every few years, as a reviewer, one encounters a novel whose ineptitudes are so many in number, and so thoroughgoing, that to explain them fully would produce a text that exceeded the novel itself in both length and interest.Nice try, Bobby Mac.
