B.R. Myers: A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack On The Growing Pretentiousness In American Literary Prose

When B.R. Myers' essay "A Reader's Manifesto" was published last year in The Atlantic Monthly, intelligentsia-baiting newspaper editors' eyes lit up and book critics fell stonily silent. Myers—an amateur with a detailed set of complaints about highly touted authors Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson—served up lengthy quotes from some of the award-winning books of the past decade, then laid out the multiple levels on which their prose failed. Myers aims his wrath not just at writers, but at the entire literary establishment, for bullying the public into buying what he considers to be unnecessarily dense and difficult novels. He makes the reasonable assertion that critics spend so much time immersed in their chosen media that they begin to prefer dissonance, just because it's unfamiliar. After establishing an unofficial policy of non-recognition, critics struck back at the original article when the chorus of dittoes became deafening: Many book reviewers accused Myers of being a presumptuous philistine and a nitpicker. Myers answers those critics in the book-length version of his essay, A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack On The Growing Pretentiousness In American Literary Prose. The give-and-take makes for entertaining reading, as any spirited debate would, but Myers' original text holds the most fascination. He's downright snide as he rips apart what passes for challenging writing, which he believes to be intentionally muddled (to encourage skimming). He further contends that when translated into plain English, the works of the pretentious-prose brigade amount to crude genre fiction, dressed up in pseudo-philosophy and populated by characters so offbeat that they say nothing about recognizable human behavior. The subtextual rage in A Reader's Manifesto stems from Myers' feeling that potential readers, having sampled the new canon, are being turned away from pursuing literature in greater depth. Here, he may protest too much: It's highly likely that common bibliophiles as well as critics derive real enjoyment from obtuse and unusual books. After all, seeing the world from an alien perspective can be enjoyable, as can meeting semi-profundities halfway. By insisting that prose be objectively judged, Myers leaves aside questions of tone and context, and since, by design, he ignores the plots of the books he shreds, he sidesteps the question of whether, for example, DeLillo's exaggeration and affectlessness may suit the stories he tells. Nevertheless, A Reader's Manifesto makes relevant points about the widespread abandonment of clarity in contemporary fiction. Aspiring writers would do well to keep a copy handy, parked next to their Strunk & White.