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My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays
Steven Moore[’s] criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy.—Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker
Before he embarked on his massive history of the novel, Steven Moore was best known as a tireless promoter of innovative fiction, mostly by way of hundreds of book reviews published from the late 1970s onward. Virtually all have been gathered for this collection, which offers a panoramic view of modern fiction, ranging from well-known authors like Barth and Pynchon to lesser-known but deserving ones, many published by small presses. Moore also reviews dozens of critical studies of this fiction, and takes some side trips into rock music and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The second half of the book reprints Moore’s best essays. Several deal with novelist William Gaddis — on whom Moore is considered the leading authority — and other writers associated with him (Chandler Brossard, Alan Ansen, David Markson, Sheri Martinelli), all of which have been updated for this collection. Others champion such writers as Alexander Theroux, Brigid Brophy, Edward Dahlberg, Carole Maso, W. M. Spackman, and Rikki Ducornet. Two essays deal with the late David Foster Wallace, whom Moore knew, and others treat such matters as book reviewing, postmodernism, the Beat movement, maximalism, gay literature, punctuation, nympholepsy, and the history of the novel.
Steven Moore (PhD Rutgers, 1988) is the author and editor of several books on William Gaddis, as well as of The Novel: An Alternative History (2010, 2013). From 1988 to 1996 he was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction/Dalkey Archive Press.
Before he embarked on his massive history of the novel, Steven Moore was best known as a tireless promoter of innovative fiction, mostly by way of hundreds of book reviews published from the late 1970s onward. Virtually all have been gathered for this collection, which offers a panoramic view of modern fiction, ranging from well-known authors like Barth and Pynchon to lesser-known but deserving ones, many published by small presses. Moore also reviews dozens of critical studies of this fiction, and takes some side trips into rock music and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The second half of the book reprints Moore’s best essays. Several deal with novelist William Gaddis — on whom Moore is considered the leading authority — and other writers associated with him (Chandler Brossard, Alan Ansen, David Markson, Sheri Martinelli), all of which have been updated for this collection. Others champion such writers as Alexander Theroux, Brigid Brophy, Edward Dahlberg, Carole Maso, W. M. Spackman, and Rikki Ducornet. Two essays deal with the late David Foster Wallace, whom Moore knew, and others treat such matters as book reviewing, postmodernism, the Beat movement, maximalism, gay literature, punctuation, nympholepsy, and the history of the novel.
Steven Moore (PhD Rutgers, 1988) is the author and editor of several books on William Gaddis, as well as of The Novel: An Alternative History (2010, 2013). From 1988 to 1996 he was managing editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction/Dalkey Archive Press.
760 pages, Hardcover
Published April 4, 2017
About the author
Steven Moore
108 books170 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Steven Moore is a literary critic. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1988.
While Moore has been a teacher, bookstore owner, book reviewer, and columnist, he is most well known for his work as an editor and author of literary criticism. Moore is the foremost authority on William Gaddis, having written a book on this author, supervised the collection of several critical essays, and assisted in the translation of Gaddis' work into Chinese.
The wikipedia entry.
Steven Moore is a literary critic. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1988.
While Moore has been a teacher, bookstore owner, book reviewer, and columnist, he is most well known for his work as an editor and author of literary criticism. Moore is the foremost authority on William Gaddis, having written a book on this author, supervised the collection of several critical essays, and assisted in the translation of Gaddis' work into Chinese.
The wikipedia entry.
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April 15, 2017I basically owe my reading life to Steven Moore. This is a rather well established fact on gr. So suggestions of partisanship (acceded to already on my profile description) and charges of bias (if you're not bias'd I'm not interested*) are not only well founded but irrelevant. Just to illustrate, that one paragraph from Moore's famous review of IJ (first appearing in RCF something something now included in this new volume) ::
Please, if you've not yet, your library wants these references ; here they are for convenience ::
The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays
Those four hundred or so pages of reviews found in the latter go a long way to fleshing out the LISTs (of wonders, of magic) found in the prior two, Rabelais' Codpiece and The Shandian Spawn. And happily this latter one too has a LIST. Here it is [p721] ::
Many big, maximalist novels are set, appropriately and even symbiotically, in big cities such as
Alexandria (Lawrence Durrell's quartet)
Beijing (Cao Xuequin's Story of the Stone)
Berlin (Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz))
Boston (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic)
Chicago (Mark Smith's Death of the Detective, Leon Forrest's Divine Days)
Dublin (Joyce)
Glasgow (Alasdair Gray's Lanark)
Havana (Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers, José Lezama Lima's Paradiso)
London (George W. M. Reynolds's Mysteries of London, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God, Julián Ríos's Larva, Martin Amis's London Fields, Zadie Smith's White Teeth)
Los Angeles (James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning) { sic! and Vanessa Place's La Medusa }
Mexico City (Carlos Fuentes's novels, Fernando del Paso's Palinuro of Mexico)
Montreal (Norm Sibum's Traymore Rooms)
Mumbai (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games)
New York City (William Gaddis's Recognitions and J R, Paul Goodman's Empire City, Joseph McElroy's Women and Men, Sergio de la Pava's Naked Singularity)
Paris (Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, George Perec's Life A User's Manual)
San Francisco (Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel)
St. Petersburg (Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Andrei Bely's Petersburg
Tokyo (Hiraga Gennai's Rootless Weeds, Haruki Murakami's IQ84)
Vienna (Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, Heimat von Doderer's Demons
Istanbul (Buket Uzuner's I Am Istanbul)
and points in between. Großstadtromane the Germans call them. [indicative, isn't it? that Vollmann hasn't been credited with one of these Großstadtromane ; he like me's a country=boy at heart.]
At anyrate, this foregoing Lovely LIST is from Moore's review of Adam Buenosayres: A Critical Edition which all of you who take pleasure in reading ought to read. In his review (which is probably available online) he takes the opportunity to speak about the Maximalist Genre in general. So, let's take a look at the list which precedes the preceding LIST :: "Maximalist novels don't necessarily have to be big: they need only display maximal use of the full resources of language, its complete lexicon, its wide array of rhetorical devices." I don't know why knot=everyone is a devotee of the Maximalist!! If you love to read, etc etc etc etc. But then to illustrate his comment (which, come=on, doesn't claim the rigors of a "definition" ; this is a Wittgensteinian pointing and thus the illumination brought by the list) ::
Djuna Barnes' compact Nightwood [and Ryder I'm sure]
Arno Schmidt's dense novellas
Mark Leyner's clown-car-packed books
along with even shorter ones by Ronald Firbank
and W. M. Spackman.
But...
François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
Hermann Melville's Moby-Dick
James Joyce's Ulysses
and any number of novels published later in the 20th century**
and into the 21st. (David Mitchell's Bone Clocks appeared as I was writing this). [end quote]
So at anyrate, I just can't conceive of a reader who wouldn't swoon at a LIST like this/these/take-your-pic. I mean, I wanna append an introductory clause to stuff like this :: "I'm going to read....."
Thank you, Mr Moore ; my reading would be massively impoverished had it knot=been for the work you've done these past several decades unEARTHing the BURIED and fete'ing the unfete'd.
[legal ; gift copy provided by the author. Many thanks, Steve!]
* "The worst reviews are 'balanced' ones that find as many faults as virtues in a book." [p11]
** And for a list of big books by female writers, see our attempts at listification at ::
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and following.
While reading William Gass’s The Tunnel last year at this time, I feared I was witnessing the last of a dying breed, the encyclopedic American novel that began with Gaddis’s Recognitions in 1955, hit its stride in the sixties and seventies (Giles Goat-Boy, Gravity’s Rainbow, Gaddis again with J R, The Public Burning, LETTERS), went baroque in the eighties (Darconville’s Cat, Take Five, Women and Men, You Bright and Risen Angels), then raged against the dying of the light in the nineties with Powers’s Gold-Bug Variations and Gass’s massive masterpiece. Who was left to write such novels, or to read them at a time when some scorn such books as elitist, testosterone-fueled acts of male imperialism? For those of us who regard these works as our cultural milestones, not as tombstones in patriarchy’s graveyard, David Foster Wallace demonstrates that the encyclopedic novel is still alive and kickin’ it.And so I was introduced to Joseph McElroy, D. Keith Mano, Alexander Theroux, William T. Vollmann, and Richard Powers (and either Gaddis or Gass ; can't recall the exact timeline anymore but probably the Gass since Gaddis came recommended from Barth already or something of that nature). I mean, and that was just the beginning. Because my first lesson was that no bookstore carried stuff like Mano and McElroy and Theroux and I couldn't find a copy of YBARA for ages. And the internet had almost nothing on these guys. And I couldn't believe how great they were and how I'd never heard of them and how seemingly no one else had ever heard of them either and even with my very shallow experience (at the time and today) of contempo-lit I was sure beyond a doubt that these were reallyreally good novels probably great novels and I had felt cheated that no one had told me about them yet (cool that IJ is such an effective gate=way drug to the encyclopedic) and so I started looking around to get all social and whatknot and here on gr I found a few traces of the possibility that here were some readers who might dig this brainy dense experimental postmodern mega=encyclopedio stuff (MJ had read Take Five already which was like totally unheard of in my researches (I hadn't even found a copy yet)). And the rest is BURIED history. Really, guys, everytime my gr=feed informs me that one of you has picked up one of these author/books (or Divine Days or Ms MacIntosh or etc or etc) my faith in human kind skips a beat. It's cool and all to see folks reading GGM or Homer but to see someone digging into Take Five is just unworldly. But like I said, I'm pretty much entirely derivative here, a vanishing mediator ; it pretty much all derives from Mr Moore and his three BIG books about BIG books (and assorted other stuff).
Please, if you've not yet, your library wants these references ; here they are for convenience ::
The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays
Those four hundred or so pages of reviews found in the latter go a long way to fleshing out the LISTs (of wonders, of magic) found in the prior two, Rabelais' Codpiece and The Shandian Spawn. And happily this latter one too has a LIST. Here it is [p721] ::
Many big, maximalist novels are set, appropriately and even symbiotically, in big cities such as
Alexandria (Lawrence Durrell's quartet)
Beijing (Cao Xuequin's Story of the Stone)
Berlin (Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz))
Boston (David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic)
Chicago (Mark Smith's Death of the Detective, Leon Forrest's Divine Days)
Dublin (Joyce)
Glasgow (Alasdair Gray's Lanark)
Havana (Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers, José Lezama Lima's Paradiso)
London (George W. M. Reynolds's Mysteries of London, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God, Julián Ríos's Larva, Martin Amis's London Fields, Zadie Smith's White Teeth)
Los Angeles (James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning) { sic! and Vanessa Place's La Medusa }
Mexico City (Carlos Fuentes's novels, Fernando del Paso's Palinuro of Mexico)
Montreal (Norm Sibum's Traymore Rooms)
Mumbai (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games)
New York City (William Gaddis's Recognitions and J R, Paul Goodman's Empire City, Joseph McElroy's Women and Men, Sergio de la Pava's Naked Singularity)
Paris (Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, George Perec's Life A User's Manual)
San Francisco (Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel)
St. Petersburg (Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Andrei Bely's Petersburg
Tokyo (Hiraga Gennai's Rootless Weeds, Haruki Murakami's IQ84)
Vienna (Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, Heimat von Doderer's Demons
Istanbul (Buket Uzuner's I Am Istanbul)
and points in between. Großstadtromane the Germans call them. [indicative, isn't it? that Vollmann hasn't been credited with one of these Großstadtromane ; he like me's a country=boy at heart.]
At anyrate, this foregoing Lovely LIST is from Moore's review of Adam Buenosayres: A Critical Edition which all of you who take pleasure in reading ought to read. In his review (which is probably available online) he takes the opportunity to speak about the Maximalist Genre in general. So, let's take a look at the list which precedes the preceding LIST :: "Maximalist novels don't necessarily have to be big: they need only display maximal use of the full resources of language, its complete lexicon, its wide array of rhetorical devices." I don't know why knot=everyone is a devotee of the Maximalist!! If you love to read, etc etc etc etc. But then to illustrate his comment (which, come=on, doesn't claim the rigors of a "definition" ; this is a Wittgensteinian pointing and thus the illumination brought by the list) ::
Djuna Barnes' compact Nightwood [and Ryder I'm sure]
Arno Schmidt's dense novellas
Mark Leyner's clown-car-packed books
along with even shorter ones by Ronald Firbank
and W. M. Spackman.
But...
François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
Hermann Melville's Moby-Dick
James Joyce's Ulysses
and any number of novels published later in the 20th century**
and into the 21st. (David Mitchell's Bone Clocks appeared as I was writing this). [end quote]
So at anyrate, I just can't conceive of a reader who wouldn't swoon at a LIST like this/these/take-your-pic. I mean, I wanna append an introductory clause to stuff like this :: "I'm going to read....."
Thank you, Mr Moore ; my reading would be massively impoverished had it knot=been for the work you've done these past several decades unEARTHing the BURIED and fete'ing the unfete'd.
[legal ; gift copy provided by the author. Many thanks, Steve!]
* "The worst reviews are 'balanced' ones that find as many faults as virtues in a book." [p11]
** And for a list of big books by female writers, see our attempts at listification at ::
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and following.
October 18, 2020
Steven Moore, as his surname would suggest, has read more books than you. He has also done more for literature than most people. He was a champion of Gaddis when that writer had precious few champions, becoming something of a world authority on his work; he was the managing editor of Dalkey Archive during its glory days as well as the editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction; he was an early champion of David Foster Wallace and but so was asked by DFW himself to read over the manuscript of Infinite Jest with an editor’s eye (he even played tennis with Wallace!); he reformulated the concept of the novel, writing an alternative and impressively comprehensive history of that great artform across two thick volumes, and much more.
Moore is not in the habit of writing hatchet jobs, which is often the job of the hack, after all (there are some delightful and deserving burns of the kind of lazy writing Moore abhors, though. See the Richard Ford review on page 172). Rather, Moore is about amore, more and more amore. The passion in many of his reviews makes them almost Borgesian, in the sense that a reader can enjoy a book that isn’t being read but read about, like Pierre Menard’s Quixote. Don’t get me wrong, though, because Moore isn’t writing fiction, thus he reviews with clarity in mind, allergic as he is to the willful and obtuse obscurantism of modern academic writing. No, his reviews are straightforward yet infectious in their celebration of language and storytelling.
What kind of language and storytelling, you ask? Put simply, “full-bodied maximalist fiction over thin-blooded minimalism.” (370) Like any serious reader, Moore’s brain is free of “Hemingway’s Disease: the delusion that short, see-Spot-run sentences constitute fine writing, that adjectives and adverbs are crutches only weak writers use, that metaphors are for sissies, and that it’s useful to repeat character’s full names in every sentence.” (298)
Read my full review here (which includes a review of Steve's latest book, Alexander Theroux): https://thecollidescope.com/2020/10/1...
Moore is not in the habit of writing hatchet jobs, which is often the job of the hack, after all (there are some delightful and deserving burns of the kind of lazy writing Moore abhors, though. See the Richard Ford review on page 172). Rather, Moore is about amore, more and more amore. The passion in many of his reviews makes them almost Borgesian, in the sense that a reader can enjoy a book that isn’t being read but read about, like Pierre Menard’s Quixote. Don’t get me wrong, though, because Moore isn’t writing fiction, thus he reviews with clarity in mind, allergic as he is to the willful and obtuse obscurantism of modern academic writing. No, his reviews are straightforward yet infectious in their celebration of language and storytelling.
What kind of language and storytelling, you ask? Put simply, “full-bodied maximalist fiction over thin-blooded minimalism.” (370) Like any serious reader, Moore’s brain is free of “Hemingway’s Disease: the delusion that short, see-Spot-run sentences constitute fine writing, that adjectives and adverbs are crutches only weak writers use, that metaphors are for sissies, and that it’s useful to repeat character’s full names in every sentence.” (298)
Read my full review here (which includes a review of Steve's latest book, Alexander Theroux): https://thecollidescope.com/2020/10/1...
December 30, 2018
It’s a good job Steven Moore wasn’t born as a dog because by now he would have wagged his tail so wildly, so enthusiastically, it would have shot off & would have had to be replaced. He might be on his eleventh tail by now. He’s the most positive happy critic-reviewer you ever did meet. He loves books! So much! But there’s a catch. He only likes the big stuff – the fatter the better. The more wildly experimental, the happier he will be. The best ever is when he gets a 900 page novel that verges on total incomprehensibility. Then he almost passes out with pure joy.
Because he never reviews stuff he doesn’t like. (Not like me!)
For most of my career I’ve either chosen what I wanted to review or was sent books by editors who knew my tastes, I’ve rarely had to review what I consider a bad work, and unlike some reviewers I take no malicious joy in skewering writers.
This means that for the great majority of this large book Steven Moore is in a state of loved-up euphoria, lavishing endless gurgles and cooings over all these novels, from the really obscure (Mexican Trilogy by D N Stuefloten) to the really famous (Infinite Jest) but all really challenging, or experimental, or difficult, or postmodern, choose your preferred term.
I see that Steven’s entire raison d’etre as a critic has been to promote this difficult/challenging stuff as hardly anyone else was doing it and (he clearly thinks) there are so many great but undeservedly obscure writers out there in the darkness. So that’s got to be a good thing. And there are lots of names in My Back pages I will be checking out. But oh dear, Steven so often comes across as if he really doesn’t care if a huge challenging novel makes any sense at all, so long it can deliver linguistic delight on the level of its individual sentences. And worse, that Steven seems to think that him not being able to grasp what the novel is all about is a sign of its profundity.
The best example of this is his review of the famously obscure famously huge novel (1200 pages) Women and Men by James McElroy. Some quotes:
After completing the novel the reader may too be unsure what has actually happened
McElroy’s knotty political intrigue is too complex to unravel after one reading – but the inescapable interrelatedness of things – human, animal, vegetable, political, economic, atmospheric – is not lost on the reader who has grasped only a few of those relations. The rest can be taken on faith
It is often difficult to tell exactly what is going on, to whom, and why… many readers will be hard-pressed to answer the who, what, where and why of much of the novel
Like all truly innovative novels, Women and Men is baffling much of the time… but one closes this extraordinary novel with the conviction that McElroy is fifty years ahead of anyone else now writing.
What we have here is Steven Moore admitting candidly that he did not understand much of this novel’s 1200 pages, and doubts anyone else would either, but that’s okay, in no way is that a criticism, that just means McElroy is a greater writer than his contemporaries, and he will be revered in the future when his giant book can be understood and appreciated as a work of genius.
I had a sinking feeling. This was reminding me of the fairly ghastly old musical starring Danny Kaye – Hans Christian Anderson (1952). Remember this part ?
Now there was once a king who was absolutely insane about new clothes and one day, two swindlers came to sell him what they said was a magic suit of clothes. Now, they held up this particular garment and they said, "Your Majesty, this is a magic suit." Well, the truth of the matter is, there was no suit there at all. But the swindlers were very smart, and they said, "Your Majesty, to a wise man this is a beautiful raiment but to a fool it is absolutely invisible." Naturally, the King not wanting to appear a fool, said,
"Isn't it grand! Isn't it fine! Look at the cut, the style, the line!
The suit of clothes is all together
But all together it's all together
The most remarkable suit of clothes that I have ever seen.
These eyes of mine at once determined
The sleeves are velvet, the cape is ermine
The hose are blue and the doublet is a lovely shade of green.”
Well, as you can see, I’m mightily conflicted about Mr Moore. He’s a great tubthumper about the joys & delights of avantgardy non-mainstream writing, and who wants to spend their reading days sploshing safely in the shallow end of the mainstream? Steven should therefore be a great guide. But I dunno, he kind of comes across as so much of a True Believer you often feel like backing slowly away from him.
I’m being harsh. This was a review of the first part of MBP, I’ve yet to read his essays. Perhaps they will be a little less googly-eyed.
Because he never reviews stuff he doesn’t like. (Not like me!)
For most of my career I’ve either chosen what I wanted to review or was sent books by editors who knew my tastes, I’ve rarely had to review what I consider a bad work, and unlike some reviewers I take no malicious joy in skewering writers.
This means that for the great majority of this large book Steven Moore is in a state of loved-up euphoria, lavishing endless gurgles and cooings over all these novels, from the really obscure (Mexican Trilogy by D N Stuefloten) to the really famous (Infinite Jest) but all really challenging, or experimental, or difficult, or postmodern, choose your preferred term.
I see that Steven’s entire raison d’etre as a critic has been to promote this difficult/challenging stuff as hardly anyone else was doing it and (he clearly thinks) there are so many great but undeservedly obscure writers out there in the darkness. So that’s got to be a good thing. And there are lots of names in My Back pages I will be checking out. But oh dear, Steven so often comes across as if he really doesn’t care if a huge challenging novel makes any sense at all, so long it can deliver linguistic delight on the level of its individual sentences. And worse, that Steven seems to think that him not being able to grasp what the novel is all about is a sign of its profundity.
The best example of this is his review of the famously obscure famously huge novel (1200 pages) Women and Men by James McElroy. Some quotes:
After completing the novel the reader may too be unsure what has actually happened
McElroy’s knotty political intrigue is too complex to unravel after one reading – but the inescapable interrelatedness of things – human, animal, vegetable, political, economic, atmospheric – is not lost on the reader who has grasped only a few of those relations. The rest can be taken on faith
It is often difficult to tell exactly what is going on, to whom, and why… many readers will be hard-pressed to answer the who, what, where and why of much of the novel
Like all truly innovative novels, Women and Men is baffling much of the time… but one closes this extraordinary novel with the conviction that McElroy is fifty years ahead of anyone else now writing.
What we have here is Steven Moore admitting candidly that he did not understand much of this novel’s 1200 pages, and doubts anyone else would either, but that’s okay, in no way is that a criticism, that just means McElroy is a greater writer than his contemporaries, and he will be revered in the future when his giant book can be understood and appreciated as a work of genius.
I had a sinking feeling. This was reminding me of the fairly ghastly old musical starring Danny Kaye – Hans Christian Anderson (1952). Remember this part ?
Now there was once a king who was absolutely insane about new clothes and one day, two swindlers came to sell him what they said was a magic suit of clothes. Now, they held up this particular garment and they said, "Your Majesty, this is a magic suit." Well, the truth of the matter is, there was no suit there at all. But the swindlers were very smart, and they said, "Your Majesty, to a wise man this is a beautiful raiment but to a fool it is absolutely invisible." Naturally, the King not wanting to appear a fool, said,
"Isn't it grand! Isn't it fine! Look at the cut, the style, the line!
The suit of clothes is all together
But all together it's all together
The most remarkable suit of clothes that I have ever seen.
These eyes of mine at once determined
The sleeves are velvet, the cape is ermine
The hose are blue and the doublet is a lovely shade of green.”
Well, as you can see, I’m mightily conflicted about Mr Moore. He’s a great tubthumper about the joys & delights of avantgardy non-mainstream writing, and who wants to spend their reading days sploshing safely in the shallow end of the mainstream? Steven should therefore be a great guide. But I dunno, he kind of comes across as so much of a True Believer you often feel like backing slowly away from him.
I’m being harsh. This was a review of the first part of MBP, I’ve yet to read his essays. Perhaps they will be a little less googly-eyed.
September 30, 2016
The 400+ pages of reviews that open this fabulous collection could serve as a crash course in the sort of literature Moore champions: weirdo, schizo-titzo, experimentalisticalidocius, off the map completely, barking mad and brilliant, etc. Each turn of the page will present the reader with a new name (Cydney Chadwick? Dame Darcy?! Antonio Lobo Antunes?!?), and an airtight case for reading each title at once. The second half of the book is an assemblage of Moore’s stand-alone essays, introductions, oddball academic performances, and other Moorcellaneous wonders. Gaddis fans will whoop at the material on The Recognitions (alongside Darconville’s Cat, Moore’s ur-text), and Theroux nuts will howl at the attention paid to his supreme novels. Perhaps more exciting are the long entertaining essays on lesser-known names, peripheral folks like Chandler Brossard, Alan Ansen, Sheri Martinelli, Edward Dahlberg, and Brigid Brophy, some of whose works are in print thanks to Moore’s efforts. The final section rounds up a few personal pieces, including a short review of ‘Nympholepsy’ in literature, and a preface to his two-volume alt-history of the novel. This monolithic tome showcases a career’s worth of passionate devotion to and razor-sharp readings of the kind of literature that inspires such actions: long might Mr. Moore continue reviewing and writing and championing the underdogs.
August 20, 2020
This is a book of professional book reviews, about 780 tall pages. All about writers from the 20th Century, with maybe a few exceptions for writers from the late 19th and early 21st. As explained in a closing essay, this is the pseudo-third volume of his Alternate History of the Novel series. The total page count of about 2700 pages comprises a more inclusive survey of literature than Harold Bloom's canon books, and more specialized information on hard-to-find, less-famous, unconventional, and just-plain-interesting books. They are less didactic than Bloom and written in a very readable, yet polished style.
List of books I bought after reading this book:
Graves - The White Goddess
Coover - Public Burning
Stephen Wright - Meditation in Green.
Lawrence Norfolk - Pope's Rhinoceros
All of Lawrence Durrell
Books I still plan to buy: Kathy Acker, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Daisy Buchanan's Daughter, more Djuna Barnes, Mary Butts, Elizabeth Smart, Ronald Firbank, Frederick Rolfe, Will Self, Mary Camponegro, Jeanette Winterson.
All of the other big names Moore discusses at length I already owned or disagreed with. Even books I didn't love were still given fair, well-rounded examinations.
Authors discussed at great length:
William Gaddis (Moore is the world authority).
William Gass
Thomas Pynchon
William T. Vollmann
Joseph McElroy
Alexander Theroux
David Foster Wallace
Paul West
Some surprises:
Moore really liked Kafka on the Shore. I've read it twice and I missed half of the things he picked up on. His 2-page essay is illuminating and provides many compelling arguments in defense of the bizarre novel.
He mentions Graves' White Goddess, Gaddis' The Recognitions and other favorite works constantly. After years of studying these texts, he could not help but name-drop them. Even if you haven't read half the books he mentions, you can use the evidence he provides to make the all the necessary reading choices of your foreseeable future. After purchasing all three volumes, I will probably never need a book recommendation again. Oddly, he neglects Italian and German literature, as well as all of the novelists from Liechtenstein, but I doubt anyone can expect to outdo Moore's accomplishment. He has clearly read thousands of books, most of them with the attention of a professional reviewer, if not a scholar.
I was already a fan of Wallace, Gass, Gaddis, Theroux, McElroy, Vollmann, Pynchon, Joyce, Antunes, and dozens of others, but he managed to teach me a surprising amount about books and writers I thought I knew well. It was nice to see someone finally tear Mailer to shreds and stomp and spit on the shreds. Junk Mailer deserves its own book, and people need to stop ignoring his atrocious mistakes.
So far my reading experience has taught me I hate David Peace and simply fail to enjoy most of Danielewski. Moore defends them with much empirical, aesthetic analysis. Ducornet, Delillo, Elkin, Lowry, Barthelme, Barth all get loving treatments. If I'm speaking your language, definitely pick up this book.
Special warning about the 2 volume Alternate History of the Novel. It is a masterpiece. However, are you the type of reader who is interested in Tibetan literature? Do you see yourself reading Ancient Chinese epics? Since I am obsessed with books like Honoré d'Urfé's and proto-novels of Japan and China, these histories were godsends. But consider where your interests lie. My Back Pages suggests enough delectable reading material for a decade.
List of books I bought after reading this book:
Graves - The White Goddess
Coover - Public Burning
Stephen Wright - Meditation in Green.
Lawrence Norfolk - Pope's Rhinoceros
All of Lawrence Durrell
Books I still plan to buy: Kathy Acker, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Daisy Buchanan's Daughter, more Djuna Barnes, Mary Butts, Elizabeth Smart, Ronald Firbank, Frederick Rolfe, Will Self, Mary Camponegro, Jeanette Winterson.
All of the other big names Moore discusses at length I already owned or disagreed with. Even books I didn't love were still given fair, well-rounded examinations.
Authors discussed at great length:
William Gaddis (Moore is the world authority).
William Gass
Thomas Pynchon
William T. Vollmann
Joseph McElroy
Alexander Theroux
David Foster Wallace
Paul West
Some surprises:
Moore really liked Kafka on the Shore. I've read it twice and I missed half of the things he picked up on. His 2-page essay is illuminating and provides many compelling arguments in defense of the bizarre novel.
He mentions Graves' White Goddess, Gaddis' The Recognitions and other favorite works constantly. After years of studying these texts, he could not help but name-drop them. Even if you haven't read half the books he mentions, you can use the evidence he provides to make the all the necessary reading choices of your foreseeable future. After purchasing all three volumes, I will probably never need a book recommendation again. Oddly, he neglects Italian and German literature, as well as all of the novelists from Liechtenstein, but I doubt anyone can expect to outdo Moore's accomplishment. He has clearly read thousands of books, most of them with the attention of a professional reviewer, if not a scholar.
I was already a fan of Wallace, Gass, Gaddis, Theroux, McElroy, Vollmann, Pynchon, Joyce, Antunes, and dozens of others, but he managed to teach me a surprising amount about books and writers I thought I knew well. It was nice to see someone finally tear Mailer to shreds and stomp and spit on the shreds. Junk Mailer deserves its own book, and people need to stop ignoring his atrocious mistakes.
So far my reading experience has taught me I hate David Peace and simply fail to enjoy most of Danielewski. Moore defends them with much empirical, aesthetic analysis. Ducornet, Delillo, Elkin, Lowry, Barthelme, Barth all get loving treatments. If I'm speaking your language, definitely pick up this book.
Special warning about the 2 volume Alternate History of the Novel. It is a masterpiece. However, are you the type of reader who is interested in Tibetan literature? Do you see yourself reading Ancient Chinese epics? Since I am obsessed with books like Honoré d'Urfé's and proto-novels of Japan and China, these histories were godsends. But consider where your interests lie. My Back Pages suggests enough delectable reading material for a decade.
Want to read
November 17, 2020This review is not finished yet...Please come back later.
On Fraternal Reputations
"[This] country has witnessed the rise of not one cultural establishment but a proliferation of them, one hardly in touch with most of the others, each with its own set of chiefs, assistant chiefs, molls, henchmen and lackeys."
"Every group sets as its prime literary-political goal the professional success of its members. As the primary means to this end is the promotion of characteristic enthusiasms and fraternal reputations, the first sign of possible prosperity is an increasing non-coterie taste for these writers and their enthusiasms." - Richard Kostelanetz - "The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America "
Forgive me for thinking that Steven Moore gets his plays and cues from the Kostelanetz playbook.
Although nobody seems to be able to adequately define the terms, Moore is America's leading apologist for what is variously called Maximalism, the Mega-Novel and the Encyclopaedic Novel.
No matter how much people try to explain Maximalism and to differentiate it from size (or mega-ness or what I will call Massivism), I find their explanations ingenuous and defensive. How else do you explain the constant worship of each new (or newly discovered) "massive stack of pages" and the fetishistic "Occupy Shelf Space" movement that has grown up around it?
From time to time, I read some of these books, and often find something literary upon which to comment (other than sheer size). By all means, read these monstrosities, but please, please find something interesting or stimulating to say about them (the absence of which is what deters otherwise curious readers - no wonder these books can't find an audience without being pumped up).
Of course, the adherence to length is associated with a kind of browbeating which is not happy unless it denigrates any novel that is not at least 500 pages long, and which constantly asserts that all else is "middle brow".
Maximal R&D
Thanks to Jeff Bursey for pursuing a line of inquiry that identifies the false premise and fake promise of literary maximalism in his interview with Steven Moore:
"Jeff Bursey: What brought you to literature, specifically the kind of fiction you favor?
Steven Moore: ...The Who boasted that they played “maximum R&B,” so “maximalist” fiction is as good a name as any for what I love reading."
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
Moore switches from "maximum" to "maximal" to make his point. Any Who fan would realise that "maximum" described the energy with which they played R&B, not the length of the songs, which were always quite short and punchy, i.e., minimalist (even in later rock opera mode). If anything, the Who were maximum energy minimalists.
How you get from energy to maximalism defies the imagination. Is yet another "ism" (in effect, a marketing term) necessary to describe something akin to linguistic dynamism (or whatever other characteristic you want to highlight)?
Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy
Another Who catchphrase better describes what we could expect from Post-Modernism: "meaty, beaty, big and bouncy."
Again, it's arguable that the "bigness" is the sound, not the length or duration, of the song: "the sound we get on stage." Similarly, "meaty" doesn't mean it's the "meat" or the size that matters (unless we're talking noses), because the Who were proof incarnate that "it's not the meat, it's the motion."
Maximalism too rarely displays any or enough motion. Like a dinosaur, it too often dies under its own weight. It's just too big for its own good.
Moore says that "most maximalists need room, need space to spread their linguistic wings". If it's a matter of need, why? How often do you board these books, expecting to fly, when they inevitably crash and burn of their own accord?
Lust for Length
(Apologies to Americus Maximus)
Here comes Steven Moore again
With the critical plugs
And the flesh machine
He's gonna do another striptease
Hey man where'd you get that notion?
I been hurting
Since I bought the gimmick
About something called long
Yeah something called long
That’s like hypnotizing chickens
Well I’m just a post-modern guy
Of course I've had it in the ear before
'Cause of a lust for long
'Cause of a lust forlorn
I got a lust for long
I got a lust forgone.
We’ve got dozens of prizes
With our tortured books
Driving SUV’s
We’re all uniform
All on government files
We’ve got dozens of prizes
Yeah I'm through with sleeping on the
Sidewalk - no more beating my brains
No more beating my brains
With the critical plugs
With the critical plugs
Well I’m just a post-modern guy
Of course I've had it in the ear before
'Cause of a lust for long
'Cause of a lust forlorn
I got a lust for long
I got a lust forgone
Moore's Back Pages
Moore explains his attachment to Maximalism by way of musical analogies:
"My tastes in rock music had been avant-gardish, the stuff you never heard on the radio, so when I began reading fiction I gravitated toward similarly unconventional things like Burroughs’s Soft Machine (from which one of my favorite bands took their name), Richard Brautigan’s quirky writings, Pynchon’s 'The Crying of Lot 49' (the cover of the Bantam paperback I read looked like a groovy rock poster). It was a natural, easy step from alternative music to alternative fiction."
So, as it turns out, he transitions from conventional to alternative (unconventional) to indie (small label or press).
The irony is: what happens when your scene morphs into a prog rock so baroque it's baresque?
Blurbs Become Wall Labels
Fine, if we're talking about music and you can pick it up and listen to it. But a book requires an effort, especially if it's lengthy.
So we get the wall-label of Maximalism to help people think that something is happening, other than just the length (apparently) that intimidates even its advocates. Since so much effort is made to differentiate Maximalism from Massivism (without providing a definition), it's clear that what's really at stake is the establishment of a new Avant-gardish-ism. All hipsters seem to want to be part of a new Avant-Gardish movement.
If you don't like it, or think it's disingenuous, or you like it for the wrong reasons (i.e., you think there is occasionally some decent writing tucked away in the remote corners of the Massivism), or you don't want to take the club's oath, you're not a genuine reader, you're an attention-seeker, you're not avant-gardish or hip, you're reactionary, you're middle-brow. It's a classic self-promoting sub-culture mechanism. Yawn.
Dig a Hole and Fill It
I'm yet to be convinced that length or size is a meaningful criterion of literary judgment or cultural criticism. It's inevitably associated with people who take photos of their books, like members of the 18th century landed gentry who got painted with their estates and animals. The book as status symbol and object of physical obsession.
There's a point where an author must determine the length of the novel they want to write, and then they fill it with writing, until they reach the point where they've run out of fiction, and have to tell (not show) you how much they know about philosophy, social sciences, books, prostitution, guns, venture capitalism, etc. This is how much I know, not this is what I was compelled to write. This is how much you have to read in order to get the experience, man, to be educated and improved by Maximalism.
The Maximalist Novel Defined (or Not Defined)
Here's a game you can play. Choose any one or more of the following alternative definitions:
A maximalist novel is:
1. a big, fat, long book;
2. a massive stack of pages (a Cretan);
3. Maximalist novels don't necessarily have to be big; they need only display maximal use of the full resources of language, its complete lexicon, its wide array of rhetorical devices. Maximalists...regard minimalists as pussies. Their [maximalist - ed] novels can come in small sizes...But most maximalists need room, need space to spread their linguistic wings. (Steven Moore) (On page 332, he refers to the possibility of "maximalist prose within minimalist perimeters". On page 142, he describes Stephen Dixon's "Frog" as "an interesting new hybrid: a long novel made up of short episodes, a maximalist meganovel written in a minimalist style.")
4. a complex literary form distinguished by length, an encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, inter-semiocity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. Though the ten features are not all present in the same way or form in every single text, they are all decisive in defining the genre of the maximalist novel, insofar as they are systematically co-present. Taken singularly, they can be easily found both in modernist and postmodern novels, which are not maximalist. Nevertheless, it is precisely their co-presence, as well as their reciprocal articulation, which make them fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre. (Stefano Ercolino)
5. long, superabundant, hypertrophic narratives, both in form and content (Stefano Ercolino)
6. a conglomeration of generic features, cobbled together with ingenuity bereft of feeling, and find their way into university courses because of the theoretical apparatus literary critics use to justify their gnomic claims about seemingly unreadable books (Liam Lenihan)
7. a reaction against minimalism, an esthetic of excess and redundancy. The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist motto "less is more" (wiki)
8. a book that has nothing to do with length. It's about density, inter/outer/under/sideways/subtext, a certain timber (sic) of the writing that thrives upon a multi-disciplinary mien, kineticism, etc. (Cody);
9. whatever it does mean, it doesn't have anything to do with length (Ploppy);
10. There's something happenin' here,/ But what it is ain't exactly clear. (Stephen Stills, quoted by Steven Moore, p128).
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones
If Steven Moore regards himself as a literary critic, then this is not the best book by which to judge his credentials. These pieces purport to be little more than the book reviews they were when originally published in newspapers and periodicals. Moore confesses:
"I've always regarded book reviews as consumer advisory reports more than nuanced evaluations, hence the carnival barking tone of some of them...The worst reviews are 'balanced' ones that find as many faults as virtues in a book; who would want to buy that?"
In effect, his reviews shout out, "Buy this book NOW!" He touts authors he likes or knows (personally).
He admits, "I wince now at the book-reviewerese in some of them..." I agree whole-heartedly! Check this first sentence out for a clumsy combination of promotional adjectives and abstraction:
"This intriguing and very accomplished first novel is concerned with the efforts of three women to redress personal and political inequality through the manipulation of texts."
I don't so much mind the lack of balance, it's the lack of nuance that concerns me. You have to wonder whether Moore reads for pleasure, or only to tout the book. There's a difference between advocacy of a book's merits and mere assertion of its greatness ("I like it, therefore it's great. It is one of the five greatest books ever written by a white male friend this century/in our time.")
The books under review are primarily the freebies Moore has received from editors who are familiar with his taste. He rarely reviews outside his personal taste or preferences, and he rarely reviews anything he dislikes. His preferences (as evidenced by this book) extend not much further than American Post-Modernism and small press publications by friends and associates. While his taste might be exemplary, you wonder how he is able to make comparative assessments with the works of authors who have otherwise received commercial or critical success (i.e., who are not indebted to him for his touting).
Moore doesn't review any fiction by Kathy Acker, Renata Adler, Paul Auster, T.C. Boyle, Angela Carter, Lydia Davis, Don DeLillo, James Ellroy, Jonathan Franzen, William Gibson, Siri Hustvedt, Ursula Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison or Philip Roth. He reviews only a biography of Saul Bellow, from which it's impossible to detect whether he has ever read one of his novels. OK, so he's read more (widely) than most of us. But why should we trust his comparative assessment of fiction published over the last 60 years? Especially when it includes vacuous assertions like this:
"I haven't read the winner of the Man Booker Prize, but I suspect Nicola Barker was robbed." (Not that it matters, but the winner that year was Anne Enright's "The Gathering".)
Perhaps surprisingly, Moore positively reviews Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" ("daringly original and compulsively readable", which I assume are compliments for anybody but maximalist exclusivists), though he can't resist the temptation to make it sound "goofy". He concludes his review with the recommendation that you "read it to your cat."
The Declarative Impulse
"Steven Moore[’s] criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy."
If only advocacy was more than mere assertion. Rarely does he quote sentences from the book under review, so we can draw our own inferences.
Whatever you want to call it - Post-Modernism, Maximalism, mega-novelism, Massivism - this tendency is a reactionary movement that was designed to attack and dethrone Modernism and its advocates. This is not new: Modernism itself was a reaction to Realism, based on developments in the physical and social sciences.
In the case of Post-Modernism, it's also about getting the jobs, income, prizes, awards and recognition that was accorded to the previous generation. In order to do so, according to Richard Kostelanetz, it needs its own array of sympathetic critics or book reviewers. Steven Moore is one of them. Whether it's this self-anointed function or his belief that his reviews are mere exercises in consumer advocacy, his reviews are littered with declarations of greatness, usually in the first or last paragraph.
"My Cheerleading Excesses"
For what it's worth, here's a few examples:
"On the basis of her first two novels, it is now clear that is one of the most significant young writers in contemporary American literature."
"This gorgeous trade edition, slightly revised, should reach a wider audience and gives further evidence that is one of the most gifted and versatile writers of our time."
" continues to build on the early modernists to create the most intellectual stimulating fiction of our time."
"At a time when so much fiction is banal and plain, shimmers like an oasis in a desert."
is mentioned only in passing in the new Columbia History of the American Novel - (another damning mark against it) but when the definitive history of the American novel in the second half of the 20th century is written, had better receive star treatment. I've used up all my superlatives reviewing previous books by and about him, but his prose style still strikes me as one of the greatest literary achievements of our time, every sentence deserving to be studied and savored with the attention we bring to Shakespeare or Joyce."
"The phrase 'literary event' has been dulled by years of misuse by glib publicists; but no other phrase describes the appearance of a new novel by , one of this country's true literary giants."
" is also the great American novel if ever there was one."
" is a stupendous achievement and one of the greatest novels of the century, a novel to set beside the masterpieces of Proust, Joyce, and Musil..."
"It will take years of study to excavate fully the artistry of , and I can't think of another novel of recent years more deserving of such attention. This is truly one of the great books of our time."
"With , his tenth book and fifth work of fiction, adds another spray of glitter to his reputation as the finest prose stylist in America."
Moore can obviously outblurb the glibbest publicists.
Experimental as Each Other
Moore's concept of "experimental fiction" is wedded to his preference for Maximalism (however defined):
"The first major experimental novel of the millennium [is] a monster. Ten years in the making, more than 700 pages long, sporting a half-dozen typefaces, 450 footnotes, two colours of ink, lengthy lists, a bibliography, three appendices, illustrations, an index and e.e. cummings-like typographical layouts, this is not your typical first novel..."
Is it really (still?) experimental for fiction to mimic the presentation of non-fiction, or for prose to adopt the style of verse?
Wasn't this already achieved by Modernism? Can't somebody do something different for a change?
Note that the 700 page length is the first criterion of assessment.
Thick as Thieves
"Steven Moore loves his friends."
Julian Anderson
Moore on Bursey:
"For years I've been reading Jeff Bursey's well-informed, well-written reviews whenever I see them, and I welcome the opportunity to catch up on all of the ones I've missed...Bursey's collection is a first-rate guide to some of the most interesting fiction and criticism written in the 21st century."
Bursey on Moore (Nothing if not Reciprocal):
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/04...
Indeterminate, untold amounts of Moore. Cataclysmic floods of MOORE.
As Richard Kostelanetz quotes Q. D. Leavis in "The End of Intelligent Writing":
"These are not judgments of literary criticism, but gestures of social solidarity."
SOUNDTRACK:
On Fraternal Reputations
"[This] country has witnessed the rise of not one cultural establishment but a proliferation of them, one hardly in touch with most of the others, each with its own set of chiefs, assistant chiefs, molls, henchmen and lackeys."
"Every group sets as its prime literary-political goal the professional success of its members. As the primary means to this end is the promotion of characteristic enthusiasms and fraternal reputations, the first sign of possible prosperity is an increasing non-coterie taste for these writers and their enthusiasms." - Richard Kostelanetz - "The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America "
Forgive me for thinking that Steven Moore gets his plays and cues from the Kostelanetz playbook.
Although nobody seems to be able to adequately define the terms, Moore is America's leading apologist for what is variously called Maximalism, the Mega-Novel and the Encyclopaedic Novel.
No matter how much people try to explain Maximalism and to differentiate it from size (or mega-ness or what I will call Massivism), I find their explanations ingenuous and defensive. How else do you explain the constant worship of each new (or newly discovered) "massive stack of pages" and the fetishistic "Occupy Shelf Space" movement that has grown up around it?
From time to time, I read some of these books, and often find something literary upon which to comment (other than sheer size). By all means, read these monstrosities, but please, please find something interesting or stimulating to say about them (the absence of which is what deters otherwise curious readers - no wonder these books can't find an audience without being pumped up).
Of course, the adherence to length is associated with a kind of browbeating which is not happy unless it denigrates any novel that is not at least 500 pages long, and which constantly asserts that all else is "middle brow".
Maximal R&D
Thanks to Jeff Bursey for pursuing a line of inquiry that identifies the false premise and fake promise of literary maximalism in his interview with Steven Moore:
"Jeff Bursey: What brought you to literature, specifically the kind of fiction you favor?
Steven Moore: ...The Who boasted that they played “maximum R&B,” so “maximalist” fiction is as good a name as any for what I love reading."
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
Moore switches from "maximum" to "maximal" to make his point. Any Who fan would realise that "maximum" described the energy with which they played R&B, not the length of the songs, which were always quite short and punchy, i.e., minimalist (even in later rock opera mode). If anything, the Who were maximum energy minimalists.
How you get from energy to maximalism defies the imagination. Is yet another "ism" (in effect, a marketing term) necessary to describe something akin to linguistic dynamism (or whatever other characteristic you want to highlight)?
Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy
Another Who catchphrase better describes what we could expect from Post-Modernism: "meaty, beaty, big and bouncy."
Again, it's arguable that the "bigness" is the sound, not the length or duration, of the song: "the sound we get on stage." Similarly, "meaty" doesn't mean it's the "meat" or the size that matters (unless we're talking noses), because the Who were proof incarnate that "it's not the meat, it's the motion."
Maximalism too rarely displays any or enough motion. Like a dinosaur, it too often dies under its own weight. It's just too big for its own good.
Moore says that "most maximalists need room, need space to spread their linguistic wings". If it's a matter of need, why? How often do you board these books, expecting to fly, when they inevitably crash and burn of their own accord?
Lust for Length
(Apologies to Americus Maximus)
Here comes Steven Moore again
With the critical plugs
And the flesh machine
He's gonna do another striptease
Hey man where'd you get that notion?
I been hurting
Since I bought the gimmick
About something called long
Yeah something called long
That’s like hypnotizing chickens
Well I’m just a post-modern guy
Of course I've had it in the ear before
'Cause of a lust for long
'Cause of a lust forlorn
I got a lust for long
I got a lust forgone.
We’ve got dozens of prizes
With our tortured books
Driving SUV’s
We’re all uniform
All on government files
We’ve got dozens of prizes
Yeah I'm through with sleeping on the
Sidewalk - no more beating my brains
No more beating my brains
With the critical plugs
With the critical plugs
Well I’m just a post-modern guy
Of course I've had it in the ear before
'Cause of a lust for long
'Cause of a lust forlorn
I got a lust for long
I got a lust forgone
Moore's Back Pages
Moore explains his attachment to Maximalism by way of musical analogies:
"My tastes in rock music had been avant-gardish, the stuff you never heard on the radio, so when I began reading fiction I gravitated toward similarly unconventional things like Burroughs’s Soft Machine (from which one of my favorite bands took their name), Richard Brautigan’s quirky writings, Pynchon’s 'The Crying of Lot 49' (the cover of the Bantam paperback I read looked like a groovy rock poster). It was a natural, easy step from alternative music to alternative fiction."
So, as it turns out, he transitions from conventional to alternative (unconventional) to indie (small label or press).
The irony is: what happens when your scene morphs into a prog rock so baroque it's baresque?
Blurbs Become Wall Labels
Fine, if we're talking about music and you can pick it up and listen to it. But a book requires an effort, especially if it's lengthy.
So we get the wall-label of Maximalism to help people think that something is happening, other than just the length (apparently) that intimidates even its advocates. Since so much effort is made to differentiate Maximalism from Massivism (without providing a definition), it's clear that what's really at stake is the establishment of a new Avant-gardish-ism. All hipsters seem to want to be part of a new Avant-Gardish movement.
If you don't like it, or think it's disingenuous, or you like it for the wrong reasons (i.e., you think there is occasionally some decent writing tucked away in the remote corners of the Massivism), or you don't want to take the club's oath, you're not a genuine reader, you're an attention-seeker, you're not avant-gardish or hip, you're reactionary, you're middle-brow. It's a classic self-promoting sub-culture mechanism. Yawn.
Dig a Hole and Fill It
I'm yet to be convinced that length or size is a meaningful criterion of literary judgment or cultural criticism. It's inevitably associated with people who take photos of their books, like members of the 18th century landed gentry who got painted with their estates and animals. The book as status symbol and object of physical obsession.
There's a point where an author must determine the length of the novel they want to write, and then they fill it with writing, until they reach the point where they've run out of fiction, and have to tell (not show) you how much they know about philosophy, social sciences, books, prostitution, guns, venture capitalism, etc. This is how much I know, not this is what I was compelled to write. This is how much you have to read in order to get the experience, man, to be educated and improved by Maximalism.
The Maximalist Novel Defined (or Not Defined)
Here's a game you can play. Choose any one or more of the following alternative definitions:
A maximalist novel is:
1. a big, fat, long book;
2. a massive stack of pages (a Cretan);
3. Maximalist novels don't necessarily have to be big; they need only display maximal use of the full resources of language, its complete lexicon, its wide array of rhetorical devices. Maximalists...regard minimalists as pussies. Their [maximalist - ed] novels can come in small sizes...But most maximalists need room, need space to spread their linguistic wings. (Steven Moore) (On page 332, he refers to the possibility of "maximalist prose within minimalist perimeters". On page 142, he describes Stephen Dixon's "Frog" as "an interesting new hybrid: a long novel made up of short episodes, a maximalist meganovel written in a minimalist style.")
4. a complex literary form distinguished by length, an encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, inter-semiocity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. Though the ten features are not all present in the same way or form in every single text, they are all decisive in defining the genre of the maximalist novel, insofar as they are systematically co-present. Taken singularly, they can be easily found both in modernist and postmodern novels, which are not maximalist. Nevertheless, it is precisely their co-presence, as well as their reciprocal articulation, which make them fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre. (Stefano Ercolino)
5. long, superabundant, hypertrophic narratives, both in form and content (Stefano Ercolino)
6. a conglomeration of generic features, cobbled together with ingenuity bereft of feeling, and find their way into university courses because of the theoretical apparatus literary critics use to justify their gnomic claims about seemingly unreadable books (Liam Lenihan)
7. a reaction against minimalism, an esthetic of excess and redundancy. The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist motto "less is more" (wiki)
8. a book that has nothing to do with length. It's about density, inter/outer/under/sideways/subtext, a certain timber (sic) of the writing that thrives upon a multi-disciplinary mien, kineticism, etc. (Cody);
9. whatever it does mean, it doesn't have anything to do with length (Ploppy);
10. There's something happenin' here,/ But what it is ain't exactly clear. (Stephen Stills, quoted by Steven Moore, p128).
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones
If Steven Moore regards himself as a literary critic, then this is not the best book by which to judge his credentials. These pieces purport to be little more than the book reviews they were when originally published in newspapers and periodicals. Moore confesses:
"I've always regarded book reviews as consumer advisory reports more than nuanced evaluations, hence the carnival barking tone of some of them...The worst reviews are 'balanced' ones that find as many faults as virtues in a book; who would want to buy that?"
In effect, his reviews shout out, "Buy this book NOW!" He touts authors he likes or knows (personally).
He admits, "I wince now at the book-reviewerese in some of them..." I agree whole-heartedly! Check this first sentence out for a clumsy combination of promotional adjectives and abstraction:
"This intriguing and very accomplished first novel is concerned with the efforts of three women to redress personal and political inequality through the manipulation of texts."
I don't so much mind the lack of balance, it's the lack of nuance that concerns me. You have to wonder whether Moore reads for pleasure, or only to tout the book. There's a difference between advocacy of a book's merits and mere assertion of its greatness ("I like it, therefore it's great. It is one of the five greatest books ever written by a white male friend this century/in our time.")
The books under review are primarily the freebies Moore has received from editors who are familiar with his taste. He rarely reviews outside his personal taste or preferences, and he rarely reviews anything he dislikes. His preferences (as evidenced by this book) extend not much further than American Post-Modernism and small press publications by friends and associates. While his taste might be exemplary, you wonder how he is able to make comparative assessments with the works of authors who have otherwise received commercial or critical success (i.e., who are not indebted to him for his touting).
Moore doesn't review any fiction by Kathy Acker, Renata Adler, Paul Auster, T.C. Boyle, Angela Carter, Lydia Davis, Don DeLillo, James Ellroy, Jonathan Franzen, William Gibson, Siri Hustvedt, Ursula Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison or Philip Roth. He reviews only a biography of Saul Bellow, from which it's impossible to detect whether he has ever read one of his novels. OK, so he's read more (widely) than most of us. But why should we trust his comparative assessment of fiction published over the last 60 years? Especially when it includes vacuous assertions like this:
"I haven't read the winner of the Man Booker Prize, but I suspect Nicola Barker was robbed." (Not that it matters, but the winner that year was Anne Enright's "The Gathering".)
Perhaps surprisingly, Moore positively reviews Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" ("daringly original and compulsively readable", which I assume are compliments for anybody but maximalist exclusivists), though he can't resist the temptation to make it sound "goofy". He concludes his review with the recommendation that you "read it to your cat."
The Declarative Impulse
"Steven Moore[’s] criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent advocacy."
If only advocacy was more than mere assertion. Rarely does he quote sentences from the book under review, so we can draw our own inferences.
Whatever you want to call it - Post-Modernism, Maximalism, mega-novelism, Massivism - this tendency is a reactionary movement that was designed to attack and dethrone Modernism and its advocates. This is not new: Modernism itself was a reaction to Realism, based on developments in the physical and social sciences.
In the case of Post-Modernism, it's also about getting the jobs, income, prizes, awards and recognition that was accorded to the previous generation. In order to do so, according to Richard Kostelanetz, it needs its own array of sympathetic critics or book reviewers. Steven Moore is one of them. Whether it's this self-anointed function or his belief that his reviews are mere exercises in consumer advocacy, his reviews are littered with declarations of greatness, usually in the first or last paragraph.
"My Cheerleading Excesses"
For what it's worth, here's a few examples:
"On the basis of her first two novels, it is now clear that is one of the most significant young writers in contemporary American literature."
"This gorgeous trade edition, slightly revised, should reach a wider audience and gives further evidence that is one of the most gifted and versatile writers of our time."
" continues to build on the early modernists to create the most intellectual stimulating fiction of our time."
"At a time when so much fiction is banal and plain, shimmers like an oasis in a desert."
is mentioned only in passing in the new Columbia History of the American Novel - (another damning mark against it) but when the definitive history of the American novel in the second half of the 20th century is written, had better receive star treatment. I've used up all my superlatives reviewing previous books by and about him, but his prose style still strikes me as one of the greatest literary achievements of our time, every sentence deserving to be studied and savored with the attention we bring to Shakespeare or Joyce."
"The phrase 'literary event' has been dulled by years of misuse by glib publicists; but no other phrase describes the appearance of a new novel by , one of this country's true literary giants."
" is also the great American novel if ever there was one."
" is a stupendous achievement and one of the greatest novels of the century, a novel to set beside the masterpieces of Proust, Joyce, and Musil..."
"It will take years of study to excavate fully the artistry of , and I can't think of another novel of recent years more deserving of such attention. This is truly one of the great books of our time."
"With , his tenth book and fifth work of fiction, adds another spray of glitter to his reputation as the finest prose stylist in America."
Moore can obviously outblurb the glibbest publicists.
Experimental as Each Other
Moore's concept of "experimental fiction" is wedded to his preference for Maximalism (however defined):
"The first major experimental novel of the millennium [is] a monster. Ten years in the making, more than 700 pages long, sporting a half-dozen typefaces, 450 footnotes, two colours of ink, lengthy lists, a bibliography, three appendices, illustrations, an index and e.e. cummings-like typographical layouts, this is not your typical first novel..."
Is it really (still?) experimental for fiction to mimic the presentation of non-fiction, or for prose to adopt the style of verse?
Wasn't this already achieved by Modernism? Can't somebody do something different for a change?
Note that the 700 page length is the first criterion of assessment.
Thick as Thieves
"Steven Moore loves his friends."
Julian Anderson
Moore on Bursey:
"For years I've been reading Jeff Bursey's well-informed, well-written reviews whenever I see them, and I welcome the opportunity to catch up on all of the ones I've missed...Bursey's collection is a first-rate guide to some of the most interesting fiction and criticism written in the 21st century."
Bursey on Moore (Nothing if not Reciprocal):
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/04...
Indeterminate, untold amounts of Moore. Cataclysmic floods of MOORE.
As Richard Kostelanetz quotes Q. D. Leavis in "The End of Intelligent Writing":
"These are not judgments of literary criticism, but gestures of social solidarity."
SOUNDTRACK:
May 16, 2022
A terrific almost-third volume to complement Moore's two Novel works. The three together (or separately) are essential. Filled with confident prose that caters to the colossal. Metafiction and Meganovels are favoured. Those writers who have a way with words over plot and character and so on get the most attention. Numerous names unknown (to me) have been freshly added to the to-read list. This is a terrific and pleasurable book to read, and the book itself holds up well and looks handsome. Highly recommended. Buy a copy for yourself, and think of giving it as a gift to a book fan who's wondering what to read next.
May 3, 2021
Six years ago, feverish with images from Thailand, I wrote the following:
When the time arrives for resolution, I will be there. One day soon the followers of Coover will engage those of Barth tooth and claw. There will be no quarter. The scene will remind us of Bangkok and we will wear the shirt of Coover proudly. Through the tear-gas and vitriol we will triumph. Our cause will prevail because of the brilliance of The Magic Poker and The Babysitter.
Goodreads friend Justin responded:
I'll be in the corner, watching in despair, in my Gaddis suit.
Given the attention to reviews rather than analysis, whether that be alternative or not, there was an expected dip in this volume. I didn't care for that. I found most of the reviews wanting and his embrace of the Beats woefully misdirected. The relative ignoring of Gruppe 47 and the Boom writers is negligent. Otherwise one might surmise nativist. I say such acknowledging the reality of three percent and the access the general public have to translated fiction. I did glean a few truths in my month-long meandering.
I will not be reading Burroughs or his ilk.
I do need to spend more time with Gaddis
The work of David Markson might be just up my alley.
I liked the long comparative piece juggling Gaddis and Pynchon: why I am insistent that it is P who's the more transportive? I might explore the Jack Green as well as more Djuna Barnes. I didn't see the point of including the editing of Infinite Jest and I really can't manage his Nympholepsy. I can't.
When the time arrives for resolution, I will be there. One day soon the followers of Coover will engage those of Barth tooth and claw. There will be no quarter. The scene will remind us of Bangkok and we will wear the shirt of Coover proudly. Through the tear-gas and vitriol we will triumph. Our cause will prevail because of the brilliance of The Magic Poker and The Babysitter.
Goodreads friend Justin responded:
I'll be in the corner, watching in despair, in my Gaddis suit.
Given the attention to reviews rather than analysis, whether that be alternative or not, there was an expected dip in this volume. I didn't care for that. I found most of the reviews wanting and his embrace of the Beats woefully misdirected. The relative ignoring of Gruppe 47 and the Boom writers is negligent. Otherwise one might surmise nativist. I say such acknowledging the reality of three percent and the access the general public have to translated fiction. I did glean a few truths in my month-long meandering.
I will not be reading Burroughs or his ilk.
I do need to spend more time with Gaddis
The work of David Markson might be just up my alley.
I liked the long comparative piece juggling Gaddis and Pynchon: why I am insistent that it is P who's the more transportive? I might explore the Jack Green as well as more Djuna Barnes. I didn't see the point of including the editing of Infinite Jest and I really can't manage his Nympholepsy. I can't.
March 27, 2018
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Stephen Moore has a deep, sincere and fathomless love of good writing, literature and the good writer folk who create such art. His compassion, respect and admiration for the writers and their work is expressed with a gracious, forthright, warm, honest and direct tone of voice. The continuity, consistency and rhythm in his tone is impeccable and he opens up a vast panorama of literature with wide inviting arms. This collection of reviews and essays is an incredible feast of finds and is highly, heartily 'n hugely recommended. The range or writers and books covered is considerable —from the monolithic literary icons to lesser know out-of-print rarities— and will open up an array of doors, avenues; roads, side roads, sideways and highways(read euphoria-ways) to many incredible books. His devotion in raising William Gaddis's profile and pulling focus —quite rightly and justly— onto Gaddis's ouvre is enough to earn him hero status alone but his impeccable taste and far reaching embrace of all good literature earns him the status of an inscrutable guru. This collection is as much a joy as it is important and vital.
Thank you Nathan N.R for introducing me to Mr. Moore – plus a plethora of good writers.
Jeff Bursey's review delves deep into the detail in this glorious review:
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/05...
Stephen Moore has a deep, sincere and fathomless love of good writing, literature and the good writer folk who create such art. His compassion, respect and admiration for the writers and their work is expressed with a gracious, forthright, warm, honest and direct tone of voice. The continuity, consistency and rhythm in his tone is impeccable and he opens up a vast panorama of literature with wide inviting arms. This collection of reviews and essays is an incredible feast of finds and is highly, heartily 'n hugely recommended. The range or writers and books covered is considerable —from the monolithic literary icons to lesser know out-of-print rarities— and will open up an array of doors, avenues; roads, side roads, sideways and highways(read euphoria-ways) to many incredible books. His devotion in raising William Gaddis's profile and pulling focus —quite rightly and justly— onto Gaddis's ouvre is enough to earn him hero status alone but his impeccable taste and far reaching embrace of all good literature earns him the status of an inscrutable guru. This collection is as much a joy as it is important and vital.
Thank you Nathan N.R for introducing me to Mr. Moore – plus a plethora of good writers.
Jeff Bursey's review delves deep into the detail in this glorious review:
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/05...
December 21, 2019
No, I didn’t read the entire book in 2 days. I did read the book in a couple of months and forgot to include in my GR queue. 5 ⭐️ isn’t enough. The crash-course in literature I received from reading this book may never be equaled. I’m better for having read it. Though my wife did notice a rather large influx of “big books” I purchased. I’m sure there are other friends and fellow readers that can back me up on the necessity of these purchases.
May 24, 2024
His recommendations are excellent and informative. His style is perfect; knowledgable without condescending.
Want to read
April 2, 2017Table of contents, please. Who can show us some photos of the contents?
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