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The literary feud provoked by the opening salvo of B.R. Myers’ Atlantic Monthly philippic "about the GODAWFULNESS of today’s ‘Great Writing’" rages on, as both Laura Miller in Salon and Meghan O’Rourke in Slate weigh in (and, dear God, a Salon article actually linked to a Slate article? Has the Internet culture feud reached a detente?).

The Atlantic Monthly article is, sadly, not online (sad because, whatever its intellectual merits or demerits, Myer’s sniping is hilarious in the grand old tradition of Mark Twain’s broadsides against James Fenimore Cooper). But, to give a synopsis, Myers spends a long, growling, not entirely well-organized essay attacking (i) the marginalization of plot by "literary" writers and reviewers in favor of obsessive concerns with ostentatious style, and (ii) the style itself being opaque and near incomprehensible. Along with lots of "hoo-rahs" from critics and readers, there have been plenty more who step up to the plate to grandiloquently defend the Great Writing of the critical darlings Myers’ slams, provoking exactly the kind of notoreity and feud that I’m sure Myers had hoped his literary molotov cocktail would provoke.

One of the main complaints against Myers seems to be that his stance of populism against the critics boils down to a patronizing defense of unchallenging writing. Miller and O’Rourke try to straddle the divide with a bit of ironic detachment; sure, there’s a lot to complain about in these targets, but older classics often had very sloppy writing; there’s room for stylism and works whose pleasures are primarily linguistic rather than narrative; and besides which, the targets he hand-picks are a bit dated anyway. All well and good. On the other hand, I think people have short-shrifted Myers a bit on a few different points.

For one, he doesn’t have anything against stylistic writing; rather, he complains about writers who "exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry’s rigorous standards of precision and polish." The problem is not that writers aim at the suggestive and the mysterious rather than the lucid, but that they try to do this while ignoring the economy and focus that makes good, truly "evocative" or "suggestive" writing laser-accurate rather than diffuse nonsense of the sort seen in bad Ken Wilbur books about The Universe or black-clad adolescent angst-a-thons.

A perfect example of this problem is Barbara Kingsolver (who, Miller pointedly notes, Myers never mentions), who apparently took a very powerful and, yes, evocative series of vignettes about a doctor’s descent into dementia, then decided to stitch them together into a novel (Animal Dreams). She needed some bridge pieces to show the objective, outside world as a contrast to Doc Homer’s growing disconnection from reality. Her exercise could have worked out well in one of two ways: she could have abandoned the stitching project, and kept disjointed vignettes (in the style of, say, The Wasteland), while including the occasional return to reality as a paragraph or so fragmentary insert. Or she could have put together a strong, prose novel with a compelling plot and characters, with the vignettes appearing from the backdrop as brief descents into the inarticulable. But, defiantly eschewing both poetic mystery and prosaic sensibility, proudly knocking down both economy and clarity and dancing a jig on their backs, Kingsolver decided to concoct a sloppy, plodding bundle of banalities and clichés, peppered with meandering digressions, capped with a trite and pointless resolution. This is intersected every so often with evocative vignettes which, ultimately, fail to evoke much of anything unless they are analytically detached from the melodrama they are supposed to illuminate. Considered as a package the novel takes you nowhere, shows you nothing, and even where it was failing to take you is a boring, stupid place. This kind of a sloppy prose bellyflop, which flails about everywhere hoping to hit something praiseworthy somewhere through the law of averages, is a large part of what Myers is rightly criticising.

The other critique I find to be somewhat unfair is the complaint that Myers is being patronizing and suggesting that the "common folk" can’t take difficult or challenging prose, so good writers ought to aim at workmanlike, but non-heroic, lucid work. But this isn’t fair at all. Myers has no complaint about taking work to struggle through a book about something important. The problem with the self-styled literary prose of today is more that it, with trendy postmodern credentials, takes "challenge" as an end in itself, rather than the means to an end of realizing a genuinely complex and challenging truth. A book like Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which one of the definitive paragraphs consists of "Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?" presents an excruciating thicket of wordplay, ironic detachment, and non sequiturs which, when hacked through, only gets us to more nonsense. Rising to the challenge of a work is one thing; wasting time and effort on a work in which there is nothing to rise to and in which the "challenge" consists entirely of continuing the torturous challenge rather than using the book as a postmodern drink coaster is quite another.

All this fulminating to one side, no matter how much may be right or wrong with Myers, or his critics, I love this feud and I hope to be entertained by it for some time to come. I love seeing a critical battle, with every last drop of wit, bombast, and indignation deployed; there are few geekier pleasures in life.