At last, a book about American publishing from an author who is not afraid to say in print what outsiders with a brain already know and what insiders would never admit, even to themselves, lest they lose their place at the table: The book business is so incestuous that its offspring are sprouting the literary equivalent of ugly little pointy heads, six toes, and other anomalies associated with chronic inbreeding. Myers does not claim to be a literary scholar, just an intelligent reader with an independent mind who stubbornly points out not only that the emperor has no clothes, but that his knees are knobby and his chest is sunken. Any reader who has cringed at Don DeLillo's supercilious voice or Cormac McCarthy's pompous purple prose will enjoy Myers' iconoclastic analysis of their work, and of the ass-kissing critics who slobber after them. He turns the critics' own words against them, dissecting the very passages they hold up as shining examples of the authors' brilliance.
The book's tongue-in-cheek appendix, titled "Ten Rules for 'Serious' Writers," should be required reading for all intro to creative writing courses to keep fledgling writers from imitating successful hacks. Rule No. 9 is "Bore." Under it, Myers writes: "Never underestimate the importance of our Puritan tradition: many readers, especially those who had to read The Old Man and the Sea in high school, doubt the value of any book they don't desperately want to end. The last thing they will do is complain of boredom, because that might expose them to imputations of shallowness, poor concentration, or — if the book is meant to be funny — humorlessness. So feel free to drone on and on."
The only place Myers proves himself to be a bit of a humorless, egotistical bore is in the chapter where he answers the critics of his work in exhausting detail. But readers can skip that part, just as they do the boring and self- important parts of the books he criticizes.
A Reader"s Manifesto is the first imprint of Melville House, a new publishing company founded by Dennis Loy Johnson, a frequent Weekly Planet fiction contest judge and funny, trenchant book critic himself whose work can be found on Mobylives.com. His own humor comes through on the back of the book, where he has quoted not only glowing comments about the book, such as "brilliantly written," but also nasty comments, such as "No one will remember this article in a year."—Susan Edwards
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2002.
