Men (20 page)

Needless to say, the initial problem
Hatchet Jobs
raises for critics is the temptation to unleash on Peck the same brand of slashing aggression he himself practices, which wouldn't be that difficult since whatever aesthetic program he might be promoting amidst all the invective is actually pretty mysterious. True, the madly hyperbolic style can feel invigorating next to more measured reviewers, but if the so-called literary criticisms being exacted seem capricious, and personal agendas seem to overtake aesthetic judgment, it does raise certain larger questions about the critical enterprise itself: namely, what sort of subterranean impulses are generally being gratified here?

It's not that critics don't do a lot of routine breast-beating about what criticism is for, and how much it should hurt. Whether critics are
too
mean is a perennial topic. Or alternatively, too soft-hearted—“Are novelists too wary of criticizing other novelists?” was a question the
Times
'
Sunday Book Review
asked two reviewers to hash out in its pages in mid-2013. This was right around the time that another self-described hatchet-job critic, Lee Siegel, announced that he was giving up negative book reviews, despite the fact that takedowns got the most attention. He'd lost his taste for it; and besides, there were real-life consequences for people. He named Dale Peck as one in the slaughterhouse-style lineage he'd chosen to abandon.

For Siegel it was a question of ethics, but what I'm more interested in here is the psychology of the critical enterprise. Given how compulsively self-revealing Peck himself has been in print—frequent confessional interviews, a family memoir, constant self-reference in the reviews themselves—I propose that we read
Hatchet Jobs
not for its literary assessments but as a case study on the psychogenesis of critical aggression.

Let me begin by extending my appreciation to Peck for volunteering himself for the project, even if this wasn't precisely his intention. But the fact is that Peck published two books within a year of each other:
Hatchet Jobs
and a quasi memoir called
What We Lost
, about his abusive father—and the father's abusive parents, and the culture of sadism that reigned in the family—and any halfway attentive reader can't help noticing that the two books are mirror images of one another, begging to be read in tandem for what each explains about the other.

The family story is a pretty miserable one. Peck grew up poor on rural Long Island, the son of an alcoholic plumber who beat up a succession of wives and killed the family dogs with a wrench when there wasn't enough money to feed them. His mother died when he was three; she was seven months pregnant at the time. Peck speculates that violence was involved. When his father discovered his son was gay, he beat him up too, though the physical violence was usually directed toward his wives, with the son as onlooker. Apparently the father had spent his own childhood being sadistically abused, especially by his mother, who had quite a talent for it: her creative sadism included making him unscrew the hose from the washing machine so she could beat him with it and forcing him to eat plates of uncooked beef fat. She told him she wished he were dead rather than a sibling who had died. Writing
What We Lost
was Peck's attempt to come to terms with this multigenerational legacy of violence.

Some of this biographical backstory I've distilled from interviews, and some from
What We Lost
, though it can be a bit oblique. “Based on a true story” according to its cover, it's largely a story about child abuse, and the child being abused is Dale Peck. But not Dale Peck the author—the main victim is Dale Peck's father, also named Dale Peck, though at first we don't actually know it's anyone's father, since for the first part of the book the beaten child is referred to ambiguously, only as “the boy.” If this is confusing, prepare for more confusion, because there's another Dale Peck—an earlier son that Peck Sr. had with his former wife. This Dale Peck was ferried away by his mother; later Dale Peck, the author, came along and was assigned the same name. All these Dale Pecks get beaten—some are beaten by a mother, some by a father, some by other children, but in all cases, viciously. The plot goes something like this: A boy is beaten, he escapes being beaten by going to live with an uncle, then returns to the family home only to be beaten once again. You might say that a certain preoccupation with
beating
governs the narrative—everywhere you look it's a hall of mirrors reflecting these various Dale Pecks, either getting beaten or doing the beating themselves.

At this point, anyone who happens to have read Freud's 1919 essay “A Child Is Being Beaten” will have alarm bells clanging in her ears. Freud reports that watching other children get spanked turns out to be a frequent childhood erotic fantasy for both boys and girls, or so a number of patients told him (in fact, one such fantasizer was apparently his daughter Anna, whom Freud analyzed when she was in her early twenties, there being a dearth of other psychoanalysts around at the time). This fantasy, shameful yet immensely pleasurable, is often a favorite masturbation accompaniment, sometimes to the point of obsession. The most intriguing part of the essay, at least from a bibliophile's point of view, comes in an aside—often the case with Freud—when he notes that
books
frequently stimulate beating fantasies, particularly certain scenes in the sort of well-meaning books often foisted on children for the purposes of their moral education. In his day,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was a particular favorite in this genre.

As the fantasy gets unraveled in analysis, all sorts of permutations emerge: first it's the father beating another child—a hated child like a brother or sister; then it's the father beating the child who's doing the fantasizing, but in a way that's highly pleasurable; in another version, it's some other authority figure like a teacher doing the punishment. All of which provides, as Freud puts it delicately, “a means for onanistic gratification.” Yet by this point even Freud's confused—what to make of this shadowy half-remembered world of childhood fantasy, where love, spanking, gratification, sadism, and masochism merge, roles are interchangeable, spectators become victims, pain is pleasure, and being beaten means being loved? He finally comes to think the origin of the whole thing is buried sibling rivalry, and the fantasy ultimately about that most thwarted of quests: a parent's unalloyed love.

What's remarkable is how closely Freud's world of beaten children chimes with the world of beaten Dale Pecks in
What We Lost
, with its unwieldy confusion of names and roles, sadism and masochism, pain and pleasure, adults and children—it's almost as though Freud had read Peck's book.

At least Peck's version of the story comes with a redemptive coda. Dale Peck Sr. eventually stopped drinking and reformed. The son who'd once suffered abuse and humiliation at his father's hand reconciles with him in Part 2, and the two set off on a road trip to the uncle's farm where Dale Peck Sr. had once passed a brief respite from violence. In Peck's world, like Freud's, violence is ultimately a route to love, and
What We Lost
is supposedly the outcome: the son's attempt to come to terms with a legacy of paternal abuse. Of course, at another level it's also a chance to pummel Dad, since what else is a writer doing in a beating scene but administering one to a character? All the better that here it's the author's formerly terrorizing father, returned to the vulnerability of childhood by the now all-powerful son, and finally getting what he should have gotten long ago.

*   *   *

What We Lost
may be an attempt to come to terms with (or avenge) paternal abuse, but now we come to the world of thrashed and chastised writer-siblings critic Peck surrounded himself with in later life, as he administers those notorious “hatchet jobs” in the companion volume. Reading Peck's criticism alongside the quasi memoir, you're left thinking that maybe he hasn't so much abandoned abuse scenarios as turned book reviewing into an opportunity to enact new ones.

Let's return to that notorious opening sentence from Peck's review of Rick Moody's memoir
Black Veil
. After pronouncing Moody the worst writer of his generation, he continues, “Like all of Moody's books, it is pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic.”

Reading on:

Moody starts his books like a boxer talking trash before the bout, as if trying to make his opponent forget that the only thing that really matters is how hard and how well you throw your fists after the bell rings.…

For me, the beginning of a Rick Moody book is a bit like having a stranger walk up and smack me in the face, and then stand there waiting to see if I am man enough to separate him from his balls.

It's as though there's not enough manhood to go around. A private logic begins to emerge: Peck reads Moody's book as a threat to his masculinity, so he has to hit back, and hard enough to settle the question. Others may cozy up to a book with cup of tea in hand, but reading for Peck means two men pinning each other in sweaty headlocks and trying to beat each other senseless.

Of course, given
Black Veil
's subject, you see why this particular book might exacerbate manhood dilemmas for Peck. To begin with, it's framed as an investigation of Moody's patrilineal line and moneyed background (not surprisingly, class resentment figures heavily in Peck's review, which includes mocking Moody for a lengthy given name that Moody doesn't even use). But
Black Veil
is also a meditation on the innate violence of masculinity and heterosexual privilege. What was the subject of Peck's then-forthcoming book,
What We Lost
? A meditation on manhood and violence, and the story of three generations of male Pecks. Even the subtitles echo one another. Moody's is “A Memoir with Digressions”—or as Peck sneers in his review, “a so-called ‘memoir with digressions'”; Peck's was billed “Based on a true story.” These are two writers mining the same stream.

Moody's book must have struck close to home for Peck, and home for him means irrational violence. Which may explain why his inflamed criticisms of Moody are not exactly the height of coherence, as when he mocks Moody's critique of traditional masculinity as a form of political correctness—a surprising position from someone whose father beat him up for being gay. And mocks Moody's confessions of vulnerability, including his obsession with being raped, as if vulnerability were inherently shameful—as it was
chez
Peck—finally winding himself up to the knockout punch: Moody's book “is so awful that it is easy to see the book as in league with the very crimes [racism, sexism, homophobia] that it seeks to redress.” Why not the Holocaust too?

Given the timing of the book and the review—Peck said he spent several months reading through Moody's work prior to reviewing it—it's likely he was writing about Moody and his father around the same time: thwacking one, redeeming the other, replaying the brutal parent as he was revisiting the brutality of his own and his father's childhoods. The blurred boundaries between the two are all too evident. When Peck writes, ostensibly of Moody, “His much touted compassion strikes me as false (in his fiction he makes his characters suffer in order to solicit your pity)…” or “[Moody] hides his despondency behind literary bravura and posturing,” who are we actually talking about? There's also something alarming about a critic so eager to slap down another writer for the crime of shrill prose, while so oblivious to the shrillness in his own. Has no one ever mentioned to Peck that the shriller the accusation, the more it reeks of projection?

Sibling rivalry isn't exactly an unfamiliar critical mode, especially when writers are reviewing writers whose work overlaps with their own, though here it's as if the sibling under review had been magically propelled back in time to the brutal childhood world of
What We Lost
and subjected to its ritual abuses, alongside all those unlucky Dale Pecks.

*   *   *

Clearly the question of his own manhood preoccupies Peck, expressed—as is often the case—as a horror of femininity. Other critics are “a bunch of pussies,” a characterization he'd apparently do anything to avoid being branded with himself. Yet in his many interviews, he veers between aggression and woundedness, self-aggrandizement and abjection. He's been misunderstood, all he cares about is literature—but other writers get bigger advances! Enacting his critical jihads is “the only way I can get people to realize how good my books are … and honest to god, I don't think that's hubris.” As he explains in the afterword to
Hatchet Jobs
, he's the real victim—wounded by these books he's been asked to review, deceived by all the fame grubbers. Though he's also deeply worried about bad reviews himself. He's prone to overblown statements like: “The books I've published are among the best books published in the last 10 years.”
What We Lost
is “impossible to review badly.” He designates himself “one of the best writers around.” He doesn't like being at the center of attention, he says—midway through yet another interview.

As to who's the better writer, Moody or Peck, or more of a man, on the all-important question of who can separate whom from his balls, all we can hope is that there are plenty of Band-Aids on hand should they try—really big ones. But I don't want to limit this inquiry to Peck alone: his talent for re-creating abuse scenarios in his prose just makes the critical dynamic so wonderfully unsubtle. The real question is whether this is a generalizable condition, whether in Peck's story we find the hidden template for the “hard-punching” critic generally. What's most noteworthy in Peck's confrontation with Moody isn't the content of his rapier judgments, it's the portrait of the critic that emerges, with literary criticism a stage on which to enact interior dramas. Punishing imagined inferiors, subjecting victims to the same capricious abuses you yourself have suffered—well, here's a creative solution to a stored-up history of persecution, at least: counteracting its effects by deflecting them elsewhere.