Them’s Feuding Words
I imagine you’re probably expecting me to dump all over Rachel Donadio’s NYTBR essay on literary feuds, but since Liz Lopatto of The Kenyon Review beat me to it, I don’t think there’s really that much to say other than that I’m sorry that she broke what was shaping up to be a rather excellent string of back-page essays with another banal “big picture” piece. (Also, I’m slightly pissed that she apparently scored an invite to the Norman Mailer lunch while I didn’t—doesn’t anybody at Random House want to tell me how interesting his Hitler novel’s going to be?) The really sad thing is the way Donadio’s output at the Review veers so widely between silly season essays like this—remember the one about writers’ colonies or the one about the death of the book party?—and more commendable features like her recap of the Happyland kerfuffle or the profile of M.H. Abrams…which is to say I’d hardly go as far as other online critics after reading yesterday’s essay.
But it’s still not very good. Using Mailer as her baseline, Donadio claims “it’s hard to imagine a novelist, even a heavyweight champion, writing such a masterpiece of bring-it-on bravado in today’s literary scene, where more punches are pulled than landed.” Not, I’d reply, if you read Ben Marcus’s all-out assault on Jonathan Franzen in Harper’s last year, it isn’t. And, frankly, one could also point out the role that Sam Tanenhaus’s Review has played in creating a feud-friendly environment by providing a regular platform to Joe Queenan and Leon Wieseltier.
I will say this, though: I actually agree with her that the blogosphere has failed to produce an outpouring of truly fascinating feuds between published writers—and I speak as somebody who cut his online teeth on USENET, where all the truly great electronic conflagrations took place. (Steve Almond’s hating on The Elegant Variation doesn’t count because Mark Sarvas hasn’t published his novel yet, and it would be presumptuous of me to give too much significance to my own battles with Stanley Crouch and Lauren Slater.) So far, apart from the outrage over Harlan Ellison’s recent dickishness, the best I could come up with as far as online feuds go was romance writer Mary Janice Davidson’s promise to her colleague, Cindy Cruciger, to “stab you in the throat with a shrimp fork” the next time they ran into each other, and I’m pretty sure she was just kidding. Go much further than that, the sniping does get pretty lame…and, yes, Donadio probably could’ve provided at least one example; then again, the most obvious candidates for such spotlighting are literary parasites who live for the attention, and it may well be for the best not to give it to them.
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