U.S. author Dale Peck turns his hand to the sci-fi genre with his new novel, Body Surfing. (Luis Peralta/Simon & Schuster) Once described as the "laureate of critical evisceration," Dale Peck's approach to book reviewing has won him quite a bit of fame. He has taken many contemporary writers to task for what he feels are crimes against literature; in 2002, he famously wrote, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation."
But the American is also an author in his own right: Peck published his first novel, Martin and John, in 1993 at the tender age of 25, and a family memoir, What We Lost, in 2003. A Guggenheim fellow, Peck wrote the children’s series Drift House in 2005 and is a columnist for Out magazine. Peck’s latest work is a sci-fi/thriller called Body Surfing. In a recent email interview, Peck discussed his writing process, the culture of book reviewing and whether or not he’s met his own standard of literary excellence.
Q: What prompted you to write Body Surfing? What do you get to do in the thriller genre that you haven’t been able to in others?
'I am a pompous ass, at least when it comes to my own work. I think my books are freakin’ awesome. I wouldn’t publish them if I didn’t think that.'
-- Dale Peck
A: There are lots of ways to answer the first part of your question. The simplest would be to say that I thought it would make me some money to pay for less commercial projects. But that doesn’t explain why the idea came to me in the first place. Certainly, I wasn’t sitting around trying to think of something that would be the next Da Vinci Code or anything. In fact, I’ve always written about sex and violence but usually in a literary manner, confronting them head on and creating complex ethical lenses through which to judge them. Although none of my previous books is particularly realist, the worlds they describe invariably are. But sometimes, the best way to confront something isn’t head on but obliquely. Not to render it believable but to render it unbelievable. To push past the concrete, past the historical, past rational abstraction, into pure symbol.
Q: Did you have any qualms about writing a novel rife with sexual violence, especially involving teenagers?
A: Not really. My experience of adolescence was fairly rife with sex and violence, most of it (relatively) contained, but some of it exploding into being with sometimes shocking potency. For example, I can’t remember the exact number of girls in my class of about 135 who got pregnant before we graduated, but it was about 10, which is, what, around seven per cent? The fact that they were having sex isn’t particularly novel or interesting, but the fact that their sexual desire was strong enough to overcome their rational minds — everyone in my high school had to take a human sexuality class as freshmen; we all knew how babies were made and how to keep them from being made, as well — is interesting, because it reminds us that no matter how civilized we think ourselves, how far removed from our animal natures, sex still refuses to subjugate itself to the intellect.
Q: You made a name for yourself as a literary critic, as evidenced by your criticism collection, Hatchet Jobs. In addition to your novels, you’ve written a memoir, and recently, you signed on to write a trilogy with Heroes creator Tim Kring. Do these change-ups reflect a career plan?
(Simon & Schuster) A: There’s no one story I’ve ever wanted to tell, or one type of story. If anything, there are too many different types of stories running through my head, or at least for contemporary literary culture, which doesn’t know what to do with a writer who won’t stick to one genre, one style. We think he’s a dilettante or unpredictable rather than simply interested in many things (I’m sure I’m not the first writer to hide behind Whitman’s famous "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes"). But for me, Body Surfing is less a "change-up" than a return. I spent most of my childhood in a trailer in the middle of a Kansas forest, five miles from the nearest town, 15 miles from the nearest public library. I read a lot but little that was remarkable. I’ve often said that Watership Down was the best book I read outside of school until I was about 21, and, though I still love that novel, and even reread it occasionally (it’s one of my favorite things to take to bed when I’m down with the flu), it’s not exactly the Aeniad, for all that it borrows from Virgil.
Q: You made your mark with your literary criticism, taking on contemporary giants like David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody. How do you feel about that part of your career now?
A: Well, first of all, I’m going to have to disagree with you. I made my mark as a novelist. I published three books by the time I was 30, and I have scores of fantastic reviews (and my fair share of pans) to prove it. In 1998, I sold my fourth novel—what would have been The Garden of Lost and Found—for a quarter of a million dollars, based solely on my literary reputation.
But my first three books all came out before the internet was any kind of media force, and then there was a period of several years when I didn’t have a book out because the imprint that had purchased The Garden was dissolved by its parent company. As a consequence, I had neither an internet reputation nor archive to tell readers who I was when the Hatchet Jobs brouhaha occurred. This was in blogging’s first golden age—when a genuine story (as opposed to the latest YouTube video) would catch the public eye, and before you knew it, a Google search of your name would jump from a few hundred hits to tens of thousands, as semi-serious couch surfers the world over linked and relinked and re-relinked the same article, throwing in their five- or 10-word commentaries on this or that topic of the month (or week, or hour). In their version of events, I was suddenly transformed into a "former" novelist, a "failed" novelist, and anything I said to the contrary was automatically filed under the "lady doth protest too much" category (c.f., Stanley Crouch's line about me being a "troubled queen"— good one, Stanley!).
Q: Do you feel like you’ve lived up to your reputation as literary crusader in your own work?
A: That’s one of those questions that’s impossible to answer without looking like a pompous ass. At the same time, it’s also a question I set myself up for with Hatchet Jobs, and, well, I am a pompous ass, at least when it comes to my own work. So the short answer is yes. I think my books are freakin’ awesome. I wouldn’t publish them if I didn’t think that. To add a third installment to the saga of The Garden of Lost and Found: I could have published it the first time around if I’d really wanted to, but I elected not to, because the editor who inherited me was so hostile to the project that I felt his input, or my responses to his input, had seriously damaged the book, and it just wasn’t ready to come out. By contrast, I pulled it the second time around because I thought it was too good a book to be dropped in the marketplace like a pebble in the ocean. I’m not saying my work is perfect — no book is, which is one of the reasons why people keep writing more of them.
Q: What role should reviews play in the life of an author?
(The New Press) A: I think it behooves a writer to read at least some of his or her reviews, because if you don’t care what readers think, then you shouldn’t be publishing your books. At the same time (at least as far as negative reviews are concerned), you’ve got to learn to distinguish between people who are never going to like your work and people who might actually be telling you how to make a point more clearly or in terms that appeal to a wider audience than you’d originally reached. No doubt, there are some negative reviews that are motivated by private agendas, but to go looking for those agendas is an exercise in frustration and paranoia, and it’s ever so slightly more charitable to think of reviewers who don’t like your work as idiots rather than assholes. (Of course, assholes can always come around, whereas idiots are idiots forever, so who knows?)
Q: What should readers know about the art of book reviewing that they don’t know already?
A: Aside from the fact that 95 per cent of it is either dishonest (or at any rate compromised) and irrelevant? Not much. But look: some people see novels as a way of broadening a reader’s sympathies without having to travel to far-off places and meet far-flung people; others see them as ways of avoiding messy reality and dealing with tidy illusions instead. More broadly, some people see culture as this enormous, invisible edifice that binds the members of society together and makes them more powerful than they would be as individuals whereas other people see it as a distraction that directs individuals’ attention outward rather than inward and makes it impossible for them ever to truly know themselves. Criticism has to answer to both of these points of view. It has to explain a book’s cultural context, both contemporary and historical (and even a little prophetic as well), and it also has to personalize a book, lest it became a public totem rather than a solitary text consumed by an individual. But of course, no one can personalize a book for someone else. All you can do is show how you’ve personalized it for yourself. That’s why I wrote my reviews in such an assertive voice: to show that it’s possible to read a book on your own terms rather than the author’s, or literature’s, or anyone else’s. Although it’s always nice to have people agree with you, that wasn’t my ultimate goal. Rather, I simply wanted to remind people that they can think for themselves.
Alas, I failed.
Body Surfing is published by Simon & Schuster and is in stores now.
Flannery Dean is a writer based in Toronto.
