On faux-populist book journalism of the form “Popular writer X create many satisfied customers. Not quite as popular writer Y use language to unsettle and defamiliarize the terms of our existence. ME NO LIKE! X IS BEST WRITER IN AMERICA!!!”
I just saw a guy argue, using this kind of logic, that Dave Barry is a better writer than David Foster Wallace. Guys like this always write as if they’re doing everybody a favor, as if there were this terrifying machine-gun-armed robot army out there forcing us to read DFW and William Gass and Diane Williams and Richard Kostelanetz in underground labor camps, but hope is just around the corner, in the unshaven form of Stephen King and Elmore Leonard and (fill in the blank), who are about to blow the whole thing wide open using nothing more than gum, string, Silly Putty, some … crazy cockeyed hope … and a pocket lighter.
Note to lazy litbloggers, who presume to speak for readers but dislike, apparently, the act of reading: No one is making me read David Foster Wallace. I like reading him. Because he makes sentences that force me to see the world differently—whereas Dave Barry’s sentences, after the third or fourth column, are so formulaic they don’t even make me see him differently. Some of us enjoy the sensation DFW gives us. Everything in the culture seems to be at war on this pleasure of ours, and the snobbery of the “anti-elitist” these days is ten times more aggressive and intolerant than that of the reader of difficult books, and you want to make your name spinning lazy-ass sophisms that were old when Plato’s publicist was asking the old man whether Diogenes Six-Pack is really ready for “this whole, uh, ’dialogue’ format.” If popularity justified books, movies, or anything else, then the two greatest political philosphers of the twentieth century would be Hitler and Ronald Reagan. Grow up, world, dammit, already.
*applause*