On Allergies.

I remember when I had my first allergy attack. I was eight years old, playing baseball out at Parker Field in the part of Portland they call Felony Flats. A neighbor began to mow his lawn. My eyes began to itch, and then to water. They began to water so much that eventually I couldn’t see through the tears. I had to be pulled off the field in the middle of an inning. My chief reaction was embarrassment: as they say, there’s no crying in baseball.

That’s not really what I want to talk about, though. It has become clear to me that there are a lot of writers I simply don’t like, writers that other people love. I wasn’t really aware of this until I entered an MFA program and discovered that I was allergic to writers of many stripes beloved of my colleagues. The young poets, of course, are into essentially valueless “postmodern” crap, the kind of shit that I could write in my sleep if I were shameless enough to do so. But a lot of my colleagues in the fiction department love a lot of writers that make my eyes itch. They’re starting to water. I can hardly see the page.

Example #1: Lorrie Moore

People love Lorrie Moore. I haven’t read everything she has to offer, of course — she’s been at it for as long as I’ve been alive, at least — but my reaction to her characters is that they substitute glibness for humor, narcissism for actual problems, and depression for being deep. They’re thin, boring, unpleasant to be around.

But here’s why this is an allergy: it’s not rational. The technique of some of her stories is interesting, though it gets a little repetitive. But I can acknowledge that what she’s writing about — or what she was writing about thirty years ago, as she was starting out — is something important: an ongoing emergency in the social role of young women in American society. Her characters are dependent, terrified, punched into shapes they don’t wish or know how to occupy; on some level they’re wearing emotional and spiritual corsets, much as Victorian women were made to wear actual corsets, ones that starved them of oxygen and broke their ribs. I agree that this is an interesting and important subject: but Lorrie Moore’s characters are just so … depressed. And boring. They’re all the same person, which strikes me as an interesting social maneuver but a boring narrative idea.

Plus, cancer is boring. Everybody in her stories has cancer.

Example #2: George Saunders

People love George Saunders at least much as, if not more than, Lorrie Moore. He, too, makes my eyes itch. Actually, much moreso than Moore: in some of Moore’s backwards-winding or sunspot-filled stories, I find a structural technique that is beautiful and compelling, even if the characters bug the shit out of me. Saunders hasn’t even got that.

Saunders has one idea: American life is a sort of theme park, made up entirely of simulacra of its own past, and it is turning Americans (men, in particular) into fat, slobby, desperate people who are unable to touch their authentic selves. Now, my loyal reader will know that I don’t really believe in authenticity — it seems to me to be a disease of Baby Boomers, a symptom of an excess of guilt and a dearth of empathy — and so you can see why I don’t find this very attractive as a view of the world. I agree that Americans are fat, slobby, and desperate. I also think we’re terribly fortunate and healthy and happy. The thesis that everything is wrong is based on an ahistorical understanding of the world. It wasn’t that long ago that human life was, to borrow a phrase from Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short. In fact, there are places in the world where it still is.

All of which is to say that Saunders, too, has detected an emergency, but he’s misdiagnosed it. Our problem isn’t with a world that’s synthetic and constructed; it’s a spiritual slovenliness, a cultural solipsism that materially damages our souls (for lack of a better word). He’s not a doctor; he’s a symptom.

Example #3: John Updike

I’ll make this brief: the next time I want to read about a narcissist’s penis, I’ll just write something about my own.

Yeah, but so what?

I don’t know what. That’s why this is a blog, not an essay I’m submitting to the wider literary world. I guess part of the point is that I’m not embarrassed when I have an allergic reaction to an author the way I was when I had my first attack of hay fever. I have to restrain my hostility, and I’m not very good at that. I start sneezing on everybody.