The Soul-Sucking Suckiness of

B.R. Myers
Garth Risk Hallberg

The Bad Boyʼs Anger

One opens The Atlantic Monthly and is promptly introduced to a burst of

joyless contrarianism. Tiring of it, one skims ahead to the book reviews,
only to realize: this is the book review. A common experience for even the
occasional reader of B.R. Myers, it never fails to make the heart sink. The
problem is not only one of craft and execution. Myers writes as if the
purpose of criticism were to obliterate its object. He scores his little
points, but so what? Do reviewers really believe that isolating a few
unlovely lines in a five hundred page novel, ignoring the context for that
unloveliness, and then pooh-poohing what remains constitutes a reading?
Is this what passes for judgment these days?

If so, Myers would have a lot to answer for. But in the real world, instances
donʼt yield general truths with anything like the haste of a typical Myers
paragraph (of which the foregoing is a parody). And so, even as he grasps
for lofty universalism, Brian Reynolds Myers remains sui generis, the bad
boy of reviewers, lit-critʼs Dennis Rodman.

Myers came to prominence, or what passes for it in the

media microcosmos, via “A Readerʼs Manifesto,” a long
jeremiad against “the modern ‘literaryʼ best seller” and
“the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose.” It
earned notice primarily for its attack on the work and
reputation of novelists lauded for their style – Cormac
McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and E. Annie Proulx, among others. Many of
these writers were ripe for reevaluation, and “A Readerʼs Manifesto” was
read widely enough to land Myers a contributing editor gig at The Atlantic.
It was subsequently published as a stand-alone book. Yet the essay was
itself little more than an exercise in style, and not a very persuasive one at
that. It was hard to say which was more irritating: Myersʼ scorched-earth
certainties; his method, a kind of myopic travesty of New Criticism; or his
own prose, a donnish pastiche of high-minded affectation and dreary
cliché.

I canʼt be the only reader who wanted to cry out against the manifesto
being promulgated on my behalf, but Myers had insulated himself in
several ways. First, he had been so thoroughgoingly tendentious, and at
such length, that to rebut his 13,000 words required 13,000 of oneʼs own.
Second: his jadedness was infectious. It made one weary of reading,
weary of writing, weary of life. Finally, in the The Atlantic‘s letters section,
he showed himself to be no less willing to resort to pugnacious
misreadings of his correspondents than he had been of his original
subjects. “I have no idea why Jed Cohen thinks I have disparaged a
hundred years of literature…” he wrote, in an exchange about his Tree of
Smoke review. “Saying that reputations must never be reviewed would
place reviewers above criticism.” No, one wanted to object. Saying that
reviewers must never be reviewed would place reviewers above criticism.
Mr. Cohen is himself criticizing a reviewer. But to argue with Myers was,
manifestly, to summon his contempt. And so he whirled mirthlessly on,
flourishing the word “prose” like a magic wand, working pale variations on
his Readerʼs Manifesto. In your face, Toni Morrison!

To date, I have yet to read a comprehensive debunking of the Myers

bunkum. But his recent review of Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom really
does seem to invite one – not so much because I liked the book and he
didnʼt, or because it caught the eye of David Brooks and from there
spread to the far corners of the Internet, but because of the willfulness of
his misrepresentations to the reader, and the radical degree of projection
involved. To the long-time Myers watcher, the review, titled, “Smaller Than
Life” looks to be a giant mirror: what Myers takes to be the philistinism of
contemporary literature is an enormous reflection of his own.

Close Reading

Myers premises his complaints against Freedom on the

 “smallness” of its characters – their likeness to “the folks
next door.” In support of these descriptions, he tenders a
few details from the text: Patty Berglund bakes cookies and
is “relatively dumber” than her siblings. Her husband Walter
has a red face and his “most salient quality . . . [is] his
niceness.” Richard Katz is a womanizing punk musician. See?
Tiny. Insignificant. “Nonentities.” But even at this early stage of the
argument, what should be obvious to even unsympathetic readers of the
book is the smallness of Myersʼ imagination. Set Richard Katz aside for
the moment (maybe Myers lives next door to some priapic indie rockers).
Isnʼt “relatively dumber” – an elaboration of the idea that Pattyʼs siblings
“were more like what her parents had been hoping for” – meant to tell us
more about Pattyʼs self-image than about her IQ? Patty will return to the
theme in her whip-smart autobiography, after all. And mightnʼt some
readers find this will-to-averageness “interesting,” psychologically
speaking? Also: Isnʼt Walterʼs most “salient” quality (carefully elided in
Myersʼ quotation) actually “his love of Patty?” And “salient” for whom?
Not for the author, but for the subtly anti-Berglund neighbors on Ramsey
Hill, whose point-of-view mediates the novelʼs opening section, “Good
Neighbors.” Either unwittingly or purposefully, Myers has made a cardinal
error. He has mistaken the charactersʼ angle of vision for the novelistʼs.

As if to compensate for the oversight, he hastily concedes that the

“insignificance” of its principals (again, insignificance to whom?) need not
doom a novel itself to insignificance: “A good storyteller can interest us in
just about anybody, as Madame Bovary demonstrates.” Invidious
comparison alert! But Myers seems to have not read Madame Bovary, or,
at best, to have paid it the same glancing attention he pays to Freedom.
For the former has more to tell us about the latterʼs style than about its
“storytelling.”

Though Franzenʼs temperament is warmer – he doesnʼt

aspire to Flaubert‘s fearsome objectivity – his technique
relies to an unusual degree on the free indirect
discourse Madame Bovary pioneered. Flaubert inhabits his
 characters, Lydia Davis tells us in the introduction to her
new translation, in order to “[hold] up a miror to the middle-
and lower-middle-class world of his day, with all its little
habits, fashions, fads.” Irony is everywhere present,
especially, she writes elsewhere, “in the words and phrases
in the novel to which he gives special emphasis” – that is,
underlining or italics.

They appear throughout the novel, starting on the first page with new
boy. With this emphasis he is drawing attention to language that was
commonly, and unthinkingly, used to express shared ideas that were
also unquestioned.

Freedom, too, aims to be contemporary – perhaps even, as Myers puts it,

“strenuously” so. But the scattered instances of “juvenile” glibness and
vulgarity he portrays as its mother-tongue (“the local school ‘suckedʼ. . .
Patty was ‘very intoʼ her teenage son, who, in turn was ‘fuckingʼ the girl
next door”) are not unexamined symptoms of “a world in which nothing
can happen.” Rather, like Flaubertʼs common, unthinking phrases, they are
necessary constituents of the novelʼs attempt to show that world its face
in the mirror. And if Franzen “hints at no frame of reference from which we
are to judge his prose critically,” itʼs only because he assumes his readers
have read other novels written since 1850, and so already possess that
frame themselves.

Not that Myers has any apparent trouble “judging the prose”; Franzenʼs is
“slovenly,” he insists. Nor is this the only place he seeks to have it both
ways. The vulgarity he imputes at first to Franzen he finally does get
around to pinning on Patty…but only to demonstrate that she “is too
stupid to merit reading about.” Conversely, Franzenʼs attempts at
eloquence reveal him to be one of those people “who think highly enough
of their own brains” that they must “worry about being thought elitist.”
(Stupid people, smart people, “middlebrow” people; is there anyone who
doesnʼt count as a “nonentity,” in B.R. Myers book?)

It would be a mistake, however – a Myers-ish one – to read too much into

this incoherence. The simple fact is that Myersʼ conception of language is
itself vulgar. “Prose,” for him, equals syntax plus diction, and is expected
to denote, rather than to evoke. He positions himself as proseʼs defender.
But when he uses the word, or its cousin, “style,” what heʼs really asking is
for it to give way to more and faster plot. (Itʼs a preference Flaubert would
have regarded with some amusement. “‘These days, what I really adore
are stories that can be read all in one go,'” he has his protagonist say. “‘I
detest common heroes and moderate feelings.'”) Myers dismisses one of
Franzenʼs showier metaphors – “Gene…stirred the cauldrons like a Viking
oarsman” – as “half-baked,” with no consideration for the way it connects
to the Minnesota Vikings-themed rec room of the opening pages, or the
Vikings garb these Minnesotans wear, or ultimately to “the old Swedish-
gened depression” Geneʼs son, Walter, feels “seeping up inside him . . .
like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake.” Similarly, Myers writes
off Freedomʼs ornithological tropes as clichés, while giving us, in his own
voice, sinking hearts, pushed luck, “busy lives,” “[getting] a pass,”
“aspects of society,” “interesting individuals” – shopworn phrase following
shopworn phrase “as the night the day.”

(This is not to mention the larger cliché of think-piece provocation – the

You thought it was black, but really itʼs white school of journalism. Itʼs no
coincidence that “A Readerʼs Manifesto” appeared in a magazine that was
clawing back market share with cover slugs like Is God an Accident? and
Did Christianity Cause the Crash? and The End of White America? and
The End of Men. The approach would be codified, with no apparent irony,
in the 2008 relaunch slogan: “The Atlantic. Think. Again.” But is “thinking”
really le mot juste here? Itʼs surely no commendation for a critic that we
know what heʼs going to say about a novelist before weʼve read the review.
Or before either of us has read the book.)

Remarkably, Myers even manages to be wrong when he tries to concede

something positive about Freedom. “Perhaps the only character who
holds the readerʼs interest is Walter,” he writes. But the adult Walter is by
far the novelʼs least fully realized character. Of course, this late softening
in the review is probably, like the invocation of Emma B., purely rhetorical,
but Iʼll condescend, as a demonstration of my own fair-mindedness, to
grant Myers exactly the same degree of benefit of the doubt he imagines
heʼs extending to Franzen.

He is absolutely correct that contemporary book reviewers are far too

“reluctan[t] to quote from the text,” but he confuses close-reading with
mere assertive quotation. He consistently shows himself, here and
elsewhere, to be deaf to point-of-view, tone, and implication. Indeed, he
seems to revel in this deafness. (He quotes a line of capitalized dialogue –
“I KNOW ITʼS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN” – and then confesses, with
italics. “I have no idea what this is meant to sound like.”) This is sort of like
an art critic trumpeting his glaucoma. Or like a restaurant reviewer who
canʼt stomach meat.

Whoʼs Down in Whoville?

Of course, Myersʼ real target isnʼt Jonathan Franzen, or even “the modern
literary bestseller,” so much as it is “our age, the Age of Unseriousness.”
The old values – truth, civility, Seriousness – are seen to be under attack
from “chat-room[s] . . . Twitter . . . The Daily Show . . . the blogosphere,”
and “our critical establishment.” Extremism in their defense can be no
vice. But, as with conservative pundits of many stripes, Myers is perfectly
willing to be “truthy,” uncivil, and unserious himself, when it suits his
purposes. “I especially liked how the author got a pass for the first
chapter,” he huffs at one point, with the sarcasm of a high-school
Heather. Thus does he participate in the destruction of value he claims to
lament.

Moreover, Myers has, symptomatically, mistaken a signifier for the thing it

signifies. The underlying cause of the contemporary ills he keeps alluding
to is not the coarseness of our language, but our narcissism, whose most
“salient” form (as Iʼve argued elsewhere) is a seen-it-all knowingness that
inflates the observer at the expense of the thing observed. In this sense,
B.R. Myers couldnʼt be more of-the-moment. Itʼs no wonder heʼs baffled
by those turns of phrase by which the novelist seeks to disappear into his
characters.
Finally – and most damningly – Myers has little to tell us about beauty. For
Flaubertʼs contemporary Baudelaire, beauty was

made up of an eternal, invariable element . . . and of a relative,

circumstantial element, which will be. . . the age – its fashions, its
morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be
described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine
cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion.

In his dyspeptic disregard for what might be amusing, enticing, or

appetizing about the world we live in – his inability, that is, to read like a
writer, or write like a reader – B.R. Myers has placed contemporary
literature in toto beyond his limited powers. He offers us, in place of
insight, only indigestion.

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