A Reader’s Manifesto
B. R. Myers
Paperback, 160 pages
Melville House Publishing, September 2002

Originally published in expurgated version as an essay in the July/August 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, A Reader’s Manifesto was all the literary scene talked about that summer, since its author, B.R. Myers, had dared to criticize modern American "literary" fiction. What’s more, he named names.

Both the essay and book (which is the unedited version of the essay) concentrate on celebrated authors such as Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson, criticizing their empty prose and verbal pyrotechnics as being all form, no substance. Myers tells the reader that this is the stuff that now passes for "serious" American fiction, instead of clear writing in the name of competent storytelling.

Myers also takes critics to task, questioning if they even know what they’re writing about when they give these works their stamp of approval and "must-read" status. In an afterword in which Myers rebuffs his critics, there’s also a telling list of National Book Award winners from 1950-61, as compared to those from 1990-2001. Those in the former list include Faulkner, Ellison, Bellow, Roth, and Cheever, all of which are still widely read today. Myers wonders if our most recent winners will fare as well in the decades to come.

Recently, I read some of the more hyped literary fiction from the past few years-- Charming Billy (Alice McDermott), The Hours (Michael Cunningham), Blue Angel (Francine Prose), The Weight of Water and Fortune’s Rocks (Anita Shreve), Waiting (Ha Jin), Plainsong (Kent Haruf) as well as three Faulkners–The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; and Absalom, Absalom. Most of the "contemporary" books were award winners–between them there are two National Book Awards, two "finalists" for this prize, and a Pulitzer Prize. Some I enjoyed, and one in particular was memorable for its awfulness, but most I couldn’t remember a week after I’d read them (the good ones that stuck with me were the Faulkners and Shreve’s The Weight of Water, which is fiction based on historical events.)

It seems that the time is ripe for someone like Myers to come along and declare that "the emperor has no clothes." Many readers of literary fiction have been complaining of just what Myers speaks of, only to be shot down by the literary establishment as being too stupid or too dumbed down by television to understand what the latest literary darling has issued forth. Maybe they have been right all along.