Ten years of blogging: An unusual parable

Photograph of Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett

Previously: The mysterious B. Traven

The year 2015 was more productive than the prior for blogging. I managed to eke out twenty-six blog posts, or about one every two weeks. In the world of blogging this is nothing to crow about. I never intended for this blog to be a daily writing exercise, though. I sought to stretch myself in terms of research and preparation for the longer pieces, and to produce longer work that stood on its own, rather than be impressive in its volume.

It was also an eclectic year. I wrote a piece on Japan’s sakoku (its two-hundred and fifty year period of isolation) and rangaku (literally, “Holland learning”). I had no business writing this. I’m not a domain expert on the subject, and my experience is based solely on some personal research and visiting Dejima, the artificial island in Nagasaki where Dutch traders bought and sold goods until the end of sakoku. 2015 is also the year I started writing about story structure and fiction workshopping, topics I feel more at ease discussing.

Humphrey Bogart holding the Maltese Falcon (film prop).
Humphrey Bogart and “the dingus.” (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By far, the most popular blog post of that year, and for this web site’s existence, is “Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon).” This long post gave me the chance to air a theory I’d developed on the Flitcraft Parable, a brief tale private eye Sam Spade tells femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy in an early chapter of the infamous detective novel. It’s an odd digression for straight-talking Spade to make, and an odd digression in general, for the novel is a model of brisk narration and economical prose. As I wrote in 2015:

One cannot imagine the Flitcraft Parable finding a place in pulps like Black Mask, magazines that instructed their writers “When in doubt, throw a dead body at ’em.” No gun is leveled, no whiskey is poured, no dame is saved. In The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett crafted the most iconic private detective novel ever, the singular representation of an entire form, and yet in it he wrote the most unorthodox story of detection ever.

And that is an important point about the Flitcraft Parable, for it is a story about a rather simple bit of detection Spade was hired to perform many years prior to the events of Falcon. There’s not of a lot of chin-scratching in the parable itself. Rather, the chin-scratching comes later, as Spade attempts to explain what it all means, while O’Shaughnessy characteristically shrugs off its significance.

Like the parables of Christ and the Buddha, the Flitcraft Parable’s shape and ending is ambiguous, and its meaning elusive. Even the reason for Spade telling the parable is debated. I won’t cover it all here, it’s best explained by my post.

By far, the most substantial criticism I received for it was that I’d over-thought my reasoning, and that there was no proof Hammett knew of Charles Sanders Peirce’s work (which I think unlikely). I posted a follow-up in November 2015 giving an alternate, but related, explanation of the parable.

Twenty Writers: Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon)

Ten years of blogging: The mysterious B. Traven

T. Torsvan, 1926. This photo was taken in Mexico without his knowledge. It’s widely assumed this is B. Traven.

This blog launched on the first of August, 2014. It was not a big year blog-wise, but I still managed to put out eleven posts (one of which I’ll return to later this year). Worried I would run out of ideas, I devised “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books,” a series where I discuss the books and authors that have left a deep impression on me. (So far, I’ve only managed to finish twelve of the twenty writers. To look at it another way, this writing project is still generating blog posts ten years later.)

Those last months of 2014, my focus was fixed on the finishing edits of Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People, the first book I put out under Kindle Direct Publishing. The novel’s opening line (“The Petrenkos were barbecuing people”) was first typed by me in 1999. After fifteen years, countless drafts and rewrites, and a couple of near-misses with agents who were interested but couldn’t get behind the book, I gave up trying to find it a home. I even considered giving up on writing altogether. Thankfully, I reconsidered, put it on Amazon, and began working on my next novel. (The whole tortured history can be found at The Tusk.)

But my favorite blog post from that first year is without question “B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the first entry in my Twenty Writers series. Oddly, it’s one of the newer books on the list, in the sense that I had read it only a few years’ before (whereas most of the other books on the list I first read earlier in life). The book made an indelible mark on me. It made me think about why an author writes a book, not merely how—but I was doubly fascinated by the mystery surrounding the identity of its author.

It turns out that while the book and John Huston’s movie are incredibly well-known, the true identity of the author has been largely shrouded in mystery to this day.

Hal Croves, 1947. Taken while on the set of John Huston’s adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart speculated Croves was actually B. Traven.

I love a good literary mystery, and the mystery of B. Traven is one of the best of the 20th century. While researching the blog post, I read numerous online sources and articles, two books on the subject, and even scouring old editions of Treasure, including the rather optimistic (and rather incorrect) introduction to a 1963 Time-Life edition which declared the matter of his identity settled.

One notable outcome of the blog post was former Chief Executive of BBC Broadcast Will Wyatt reaching out to me via email in 2015. Wyatt wrote and developed the BBC documentary B. Traven: A Mystery Solved and its companion book The Man Who was B. Traven, titled The Secret of the Sierra Madre in the United States. (A transfer of the BBC show can be found on YouTube.) Wyatt’s gracious email pointed out that no one to date has refuted his theory of Traven’s identity. By utter coincidence, I had just weeks earlier discovered a copy of the UK edition in one of the last great used bookstores, Phoenix Books of San Luis Obispo. (I’ve long intended to write a post about The Man Who was B. Traven, but never followed through.)

Coincidentally, as I was writing this post in late December, Wyatt again reached out to me via public comment. He once more defended his work, but also challenged the other theories of Traven’s identity, most of which are based on speculation or hunches. Due to his comment, I’m updating the 2014 post to better explain Wyatt’s research, which was previously only alluded to briefly.

As I replied to him:

Perhaps not reading your book first was a mistake on my part, but I, a mere fan of Traven’s books, and writer of the occasional novel that does not sell in high volume, did not intend [the 2014] post to be the final word on Traven’s identity.

Rather, this post was intended to cover the breadth of the theories out there, farfetched or otherwise, and to give a general feel for Traven’s most likely background. I also wanted to explain why I find so much inspiration in Traven’s works, especially “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

Alas, all this came too late for the original 2014 post, which relies on Michael L. Baumann’s B. Traven: An Introduction (1976). Baumann treats the question of Traven’s identity as a literary mystery, which lines up with my interests in the subject. As a German-speaking German-American, Baumann discerns that Traven’s work was most likely written in that language and then crudely translated to English for an American audience. He also offers a clear-eyed interpretation of the themes and political bent of Traven’s novels.

Since I wasn’t interested in proposing a candidate or “solving” the mystery, Baumann was a good primary source to work from. I only wish I could have delved more deeply into the breadth of the Traven theories proposed to date. The tornadic multiplicity of names and initials and pseudonyms linked to Traven is bewildering, fostered by Traven’s generous use of them to cover his tracks.

My fascination is not to keep the mystery alive, but to turn the mystery around and face the mirror at the reader, to give a name to the insatiable curiosity Traven inspired—to remind us there was a time when authors shunned publicity (“the creative person should…have no other biography than his works”) rather than relentlessly strove to build their personal brand.

Twenty Writers: B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

One year later: When will we see Neuromancer on the screen?

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on this series.


Cover of Neuromancer by William Gibson

A year ago I asked a simple question: Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen? This turned out to be an example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Honestly, I did not foresee this. The stories a year ago about an upcoming Apple TV+ adaptation of William Gibson’s masterpiece seemed more than promising. As I wrote:

The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.”

I’m not an avid follower of the Hollywood sausage grinder. Perhaps the project is still being developed, or an incredibly secret production shoot is happening as I write this. All I know is, over the past twelve months I’ve occasionally tried Internet searches hoping to find some evidence of progress. So far: nothing.

As I wrote last year, the number of failed starts on a Neuromancer adaptations are legion. The Wikipedia section on the topic does not do justice to the number of aborted starts reported over the years. Someone should make a gallery of fan-produced movie posters. Chalk up this latest disappointment as another virtual corpse to throw on the digital pyre. What’s a reader to do?

What-if film poster for a nonexistent production of Neuromancer (Peter Stults)

Here’s what you should do: Go and read the book. Don’t wait for a director’s vision, or a big-budget green light. Go straight to the source.


Neuromancer is marketed as Book One of the Sprawl Trilogy, a series which also encompasses Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Gibson’s near-future Sprawl is also the setting of several of his earlier short stories, including “Johnny Mnemonic.” (Many of these stories are collected in Burning Chrome.) Thus, Gibson had the advantage of mapping out Neuromancer‘s territory well beforehand. It was in these stories that he honed his subjects and style, the street hustlers with colorful handles and underground operatives rewiring high-tech for subversive means. His work has a streak of the computing counterculture, mirroring the early days of the Homebrew Computer Club and phone hacking, where computers were not merely a technology, but liberation.

The story centers on Case, a console jockey and professional hacker-for-hire. An entanglement with a prior employer has left him unable to connect to the virtual world of cyberspace, an analogue to our Internet that users connect to mentally, rather than via screen and keyboard. Crippled by this punishment, Case scrounges on the streets of Chiba City, Japan, living in coffin hotels and getting by trafficking in stolen tech.

Things shift when he meets Molly Millions, a punk street-smart mercenary who sports several body modifications and tech implants. (Molly wound up being a Gibson fan-favorite, and is featured in several other stories and novels.) She introduces Case to the shadowy Armitage, who offers to re-wire Case so he can join cyberspace once more, on the condition he perform illegal hacking work against megacorporations and the military. Thus, the novel is many things at once: Future noir; a dystopic exploration of a decaying world saturated with computer technology; and, at its core, a heist story.

Published in 1984, and set in the 2030s, the novel has a couple of howlers, such as the protagonist trying to fence “three megabytes of hot RAM.” That was on the high-end of computer memory in PC-compatibles when I first read the book in 1988. Gibson later admitted he used the word “modem” without knowing what it meant. “I was working from the poetics of an emergent language,” he explained. These problems are not important and should be set aside.

While you’re setting aside the anachronisms, also set aside some of the hype, such as William Gibson supposedly predicting the Internet (which he’s never claimed). A lot of people inside the technology community had foreseen the rise of a worldwide information network before Gibson published. Believe it or not, some also predicted mobile, wearable, and even implanted devices. Once the early computer pioneers figured out how to connect two computers to exchange data, it wasn’t a great leap of imagination to picture the logical conclusion. (Engelbart’s 1968 “Mother of all Demos” was not about mice and hypertext, but about collapsing the distance between man and computing technology.) Even Gibson has admitted that “wet tech”—direct-connecting a human brain to a computer—is probably a non-starter in our immediate future. And, whenever an interviewer has asked Gibson why he chose the 2030s to set his story, he’s always insisted that he was actually writing about the 1980s.

Instead, focus on Gibson’s imagery and rich settings. He took computers out of the realm of men in lab coats standing over coffin-sized boxes in dust-free rooms. He put tech on the street, in the pockets of skate punks and the ears of all-night sushi line cooks. Phone phreakers and blue-boxing from the 70s and 80s—an early hacker culture where the phone company was the dreaded megacorporation—offered Gibson a clear-cut model to scale up from. Instead of a single domineering power to #Resist, he described hundreds of megacorporations colluding to run the world. Instead of an obscure nerd subculture, he gave exotic tech to everyone, even folks sleeping on mattresses on rain-soaked streets. Neuromancer is a book set during a perpetual war between the haves and have-nots, and the battlefield is cyberspace.

Cover of Brazilian edition of Neuromancer by William Gibson
Brazilian edition of Neuromancer

Focus on Gibson’s language and linguistic style, which blends the technobabble of computer programmers with Japanese idioms into a kind of poetry, interwoven with the colorful Chandleresque prose of hard people doing hard things. To pull choice passages from the first chapter, two of countless throughout the book:

Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologogies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.

And this:

He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to a let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the MitsubishiGenentech logo tattooed across the back of the man’s right hand.

Was it authentic? If that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble. If it wasn’t, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic.

Gibson humanizes the exotic technology without the tedious tendency of other science fiction authors to try and explain it in a calm, reasonable fashion. This world gone mad abandoned rational discourse decades prior. His characters are at utter ease in the trappings of this disjointed world, and even a bit blasé about it. That three megabytes of hot RAM? It’s stored in a Hitachi deck. Later, Case stays in a luxurious Hilton hotel drinking coffee from a Braun percolator. So often science fiction relies on defamiliarization (technology familiar to the characters seeming magical to us). Gibson reverses that polarity. He uses consumerism to his literary advantage, rather than to make some clumsy ironic comment the way DeLillo and David Foster Wallace feel the need to do.

Neuromancer puts forth a fragmented society that is at odds with the other major science fiction dystopia, 1984. Contra Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, Gibson lays out a world of emaciated nation-states muzzled by constipated corporate power and incestuous multi-billionaire families. Meanwhile, the population hides in the shadows, barters on the gray market, and, of course, jacks into cyberspace for fun and profit.

It’s a potent brew—one part hard-boiled cityscape noir, one part philosophical science fiction, and one part a pessimistic vision of unfettered capitalism’s endgame, all told in a gritty, poetic tongue that matches the rain-mirrored, neon-iridescent streets of Chiba City.

Don’t wait for the movie. Don’t wait for the streaming series. If you’ve not read Neuromancer recently, pick up a copy and read it again. And if you’ve not read it at all—what are you waiting for?

Charles Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives

Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter

What if I told you that there’s been a sea-change in American storytelling over the past half-century? Not merely a change in subject matter, but that the fundamental nature of American narratives radically shifted? Would you believe me?

Now, what if I told you that a writer twenty-five years ago described these “new” stories, and even predicted they would become the dominant mode in our future? Would you believe that?

In 1997, Charles Baxter published Burning Down the House, a collection of essays on the state of American literature. It opens with “Dysfunctional Narratives: or, ‘Mistakes were Made,’” a blistering piece of criticism that not only detailed the kinds of stories he was reading back then, but predicted the types of stories we read and tell each other today.

Baxter appropriated the term “dysfunctional narrative” from poet C. K. Williams, but he expounded and expanded upon it so much, it’s fair to say he’s made the term his own. He borrowed a working definition of dysfunctional narratives from poet Marilynne Robinson, who described this modern mode of writing as a “mean little myth:”

One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.

Baxter adds that the source of this injury “can never be expunged.” As for the ultimate meaning of these stories: “The injury is the meaning.”

To claim this mode of writing has become the dominant one in American culture demands proof, or at least some supporting evidence. Baxter lists examples, such as Richard Nixon’s passive-voice gloss over the Watergate cover-up (“mistakes were made”), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and conspiracy theories, among others.

“Dysfunctional Narratives” doesn’t succeed by tallying a score, however. Rather, it describes a type of story that sounds all-too-familiar to modern ears:

Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.

Don’t merely consider Baxter’s descriptions in terms of books. News stories, the social media posts scrolling up your feed, even the way your best friend describes how their boss has slighted them—all constitute narratives, small or large. Dysfunctional narratives read as if the storyteller’s thumb is heavy on the moral scale—they feel rigged.

It does seem curious that in contemporary America—a place of considerable good fortune and privilege—one of the most favored narrative modes from high to low has to do with disavowals, passivity, and the disarmed protagonist.

(I could go one quoting Baxter’s essay—he’s a quotable essayist—but you should go out and read all of Burning Down the House instead. It’s that good.)

Dysfunctional narratives are a literature of avoidance, a strategic weaving of talking points and selective omission to harden their messaging and block counter-criticism. If that sounds like so much political maneuvering, that’s because it is.

“Mistakes were made”

Let’s start with what dysfunctional narratives are not: They’re not merely stories about dysfunction, as in dysfunctional families, or learning dysfunctions. Yes, a dysfunctional narrative may feature such topics, but that is not what makes it dysfunctional. It describes how the story is told, the strategies and choices the author had made to tell their story.

Baxter points to Richard Nixon’s “mistakes were made” as the kernel for the dysfunctional narrative in modern America. (He calls Nixon “the spiritual godfather of the contemporary disavowal movement.”). He also holds up conspiracy theories as prototypes:

No one really knows who’s responsible for [the JFK assassination]. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanations we need to enclose it. We don’t know who the agent of action is. We don’t even know why it was done.

Recall the tagline for The X-Files, a show about the investigation of conspiracy theories: “The truth is out there.” In other words, the show’s stories can’t provide the truth—it’s elsewhere.

More memorably—and more controversially—Baxter also turns his gaze upon Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which features the use of recovered memories (“not so much out of Zola as Geraldo“) and veers into “an account of conspiracy and memory, sorrow and depression, in which several of the major characters are acting out rather than acting, and doing their best to find someone to blame.”

In a similar vein, a nearly-dysfunctional story would be The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. It involves a family man who, via therapy, digs through memories of a childhood trauma which has paralyzed him emotionally as an adult. He gradually heals, and goes on to repair his relationship with his family. Notably, his elderly father does not remember abusing him years earlier, leaving one wound unhealed.

Another example would be Nathanael West‘s A Cool Million, which follows a clueless naif on a cross-American journey as he’s swindled, robbed, mugged, and framed. By the end, the inventory of body parts he’s lost is like counting the change in your pocket. It might be forgiven as a satire of the American dream, but A Cool Million remains a heavy-handed tale.

This leads to another point: A dysfunctional narrative is not necessarily a poorly told one. The dysfunction is not in the quality of the telling, but something more innate.

Examples of more topical dysfunctional narratives could be the story of Aziz Ansari’s first-date accuser. The complaints of just about any politician or pundit who claims they’ve been victimized or deplatformed by their opponents is dysfunctional. In almost every case, the stories feature a faultless, passive protagonist being traumatized by the more powerful or the abstract.

There’s one more point about dysfunctional narratives worth making: The problem is not that dysfunctional narratives exist. The problem is the sheer volume of them in our culture, the sense that we’re being flooded—overwhelmed, even—by their numbers. That’s what seems to concern Baxter. It certainly concerns me.

A literature of avoidance

In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco offers this diagram:

onetwothreefour
abcbcdcdedef

Each column represents a political group or ideology, all distinct, yet possessing many common traits. (Think of different flavors of Communism, or various factions within a political party.) Groups one and two have traits b and c in common, groups two and four have trait d in common, and so on.

Eco points out that “owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one,” even though they do not share any traits. The traits form a chain—there is a common “smell” between the political groups.

Not all dysfunctional narratives are exactly alike, or have the exact traits as the rest, but they do have a common “smell.” Even if a 9/11 conspiracy theory seems utterly unlike A Cool Million, they both may be dysfunctional.

"Burning Down the House" by Charles Baxter

Likewise, in the traits that follow, just because a story doesn’t include all doesn’t mean it “avoids dysfunction.” Rather, dysfunctional narratives are built by the storyteller selecting the bricks they need to buttress their message:

  • A disarmed protagonist
  • An absent antagonist
  • Minimal secondary characters
  • An authorial thumb on the scale
  • “Pre-moralized”
  • A vaporous conclusion
  • Authorial infallibility and restricted interpretations

The most common trait of the dysfunctional narrative is a faultless, passive main character. Baxter calls this the “disarmed protagonist.” Baxter differentiates between “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”) and “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”). Dysfunctional narratives are the “me” stories.

And the errors these “me” characters make—if any—are forgivable, understanding, or forced upon them by dire circumstances. Compare this to the mistakes the people around them make—monstrous, unpardonable sins:

…characters [in stories] are not often permitted to make interesting and intelligent mistakes and then to acknowledge them. The whole idea of the “intelligent mistake,” the importance of the mistake made on impulse, has gone out the window. Or, if fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.

Power dynamics are a cornerstone of all narratives, but one “smell” of the dysfunctional variety is an extraordinary tilting of power against the main character. The system, or even the world, is allied against the protagonist. Close reads of these narratives reveals an authorial thumb on the story’s moral scale, an intuition that the situation has been soured a bit too much in the service of making a point. This scale-tipping may be achieved many ways, but often it requires a surgical omission of detail.

Hence how often in dysfunctional narratives the antagonist is absent. A crime in a dysfunctional novel doesn’t require a criminal. All it needs, in Robinson’s words, is for the main character to have endured some great wrong: “The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.”

Poet Marilynne Robinson
Poet Marilynne Robinson

Name the harm, not the perpetrator. Why not the perpetrator? Because often there’s no person to name. The harm is a trauma or a memory. The perpetrator may have disappeared long ago, or died, or have utterly forgotten the wrongs they inflicted (as the father does in Prince of Tides). The malefactor may be an abstraction, like capitalism or sexism. But naming an abstraction as the villain does not name anything. It’s like naming narcissism as the cause of an airliner crash. This is by design. Abstractions and missing antagonists don’t have a voice; even Satan gets to plead his case in Paradise Lost.

No ending is reached in a dysfunctional narrative, because there’s only a trauma, or a memory, or an abstraction to work against. These injuries never heal. Memories may fade, but the past is concrete. By telling the story, the trauma is now recorded and notarized like a deed. “There’s the typical story in which no one is responsible for anything,” Baxter complained in 2012. “Shit happens, that’s all. It’s all about fate, or something. I hate stories like that.” These stories trail off at the end, employing imagery like setting suns or echoes fading off to signify a story that will never conclude.

The most surface criticism of these narratives is that we, the readers, sense we’re being talked down to by the author. “In the absence of any clear moral vision, we get moralizing instead,” Baxter writes. A dysfunctional narrative dog-whistles its morality, and those who cannot decode the whistle are faulted for it. The stories are pre-moralized: The reader is expected to understand beforehand the entirety of the story’s moral universe. For a reader to admit otherwise, or to argue an alternate interpretation, is to risk personal embarrassment or confrontation from those who will not brook dissent.

And making the reader uncomfortable is often the outright goal of the dysfunctional narrative. The writer is the presumed authority; the reader, the presumed student. It’s a retrograde posture, a nagging echo from a lesser-democratic time. (When I read A Brief History of Time, I was most certainly the student—but Hawking admirably never made me feel that way.) Dysfunctional narratives are often combative with the reader; they do not acknowledge the reader’s right to negotiate or question the message. With dysfunctional narratives, it’s difficult to discern if the writer is telling a story or digging a moat around their main character.

“What we have instead is not exactly drama and not exactly therapy,” Baxter writes. “No one is in a position to judge.” A dysfunctional narrative portrays a world with few to no alternatives. A functional narrative explores alternatives. (This is what I mean when I write of fiction as an experiment.)

This is why so many dysfunctional narratives are aligned to the writer’s biography—who can claim to be a better authority on your life, after all? But the moment a reader reads a story, its protagonist is no longer the author’s sole property. The character is now a shared construct. Their decisions may be questioned (hence the passive nature of the protagonists—inaction avoids such judgements.) If the author introduces secondary characters, they can’t claim similar authority over them—every additional character is one more attack vector of criticism, a chipping away of absolute authority over the story itself. That’s what happened to sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson in 2019, whose debut novel was pulped due to questions over his secondary characters.

Of all the traits listed—from the disarmed protagonist to the vaporous conclusion—the trait I find the “smelliest” is authorial infallibility and restricted interpretation. That’s why I used weasel language when I called Prince of Tides “nearly-dysfunctional:” The book is most certainly open to interpretation and questioning. In contrast, questioning a conspiracy theory could get you labeled an unwitting dupe, a useful idiot, or worse.

A Cambrian explosion

What Baxter doesn’t explore fully is why we’ve had this Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives. He speculates a couple of possibilities, such as them coming down to us from our political leadership (like Moses carrying down the stone tablets), or as the byproduct of consumerism. I find myself at my most skeptical when his essay stumbles down these side roads.

When Baxter claims these stories arose out of “groups in our time [feeling] confused or powerless…in such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don’t know what their lives are telling them,” it seems Baxter is offering a dysfunctional narrative to explain the existence of dysfunctional narratives. He claims they’re produced by people of “irregular employment and mounting debts.” I strongly doubt this as well. In my experience, this type of folk are not the dominant producers of such narratives. Rather, these are the people who turn to stories for escape and uplift…the very comforts dysfunctional narratives cannot provide, and are not intended to provide.

Rather than point the finger at dead presidents or capitalism, I’m more inclined to ascribe the shift to a handful of changes in our culture.

The term “The Program Era” comes from a book by the same name detailing the postwar rise and influence of creative writing programs in the United States. This democratization of creative writing programs was not as democratic as once hoped, but it still led to a sharp increase in the numbers of people writing fiction. Most of those students were drawn from America’s upper classes. And, as part of the workshop method used in these programs, it also led to a rise in those people having to sit quietly and listen to their peers criticize their stories, sometimes demolishing them. (Charles Baxter was a creative writing professor and the head of a prominent writing program in the Midwest. Many of his examples in Burning Down the House come from manuscripts he read as an instructor.)

With the expansion of writing programs came a rise in aspiring writers scratching around for powerful subject matter. Topics like trauma and abuse are magnets when seeking supercharged dramatic stakes. Naturally, these writers also drew from personal biography for easy access to subject matter.

Another reason is staring back at you: The World Wide Web has empowered the masses to tell their stories to a global audience. This has created a dynamic where everyone can be a reader, a writer, and a critic, and all at the same time.

The natural next step in the evolution of the above is for storytellers to strategize how best to defend their work—to remove any fault in the story’s armor, to buttress it with rearguards and fortifications. And there’s been a shift in why we tell stories: Not necessarily to entertain or enrich, but as an act of therapy or grievance, or to collect “allies” in a political climate where you’re either with me or against me.

Pick up a university literary magazine and read it from cover to cover. The “smell” of dysfunctional narratives is awfully similar to the smell of social media jeremiads.

These are not the kind of stories I want to read, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distance myself from them. Writers should strive to offer more than a list grievances, or perform acts of score-settling. If it’s too much to ask stories to explain, then certainly we can expect them to connect dots. Even if the main character does not grow by the last page, we should grow by then, if only a little.

Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?

See also “One year later: Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?”

Neuromancer (Brazilian edition)

The Illuminerdi (via) reports Apple TV+ is tooling up to produce a streaming adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer. The big question Illuminerdi concerns itself with is which actor will play protagonist Case, a drug-abusing hacker hired to pull off a virtual heist in cyberspace.

The story buries the lede. The truly big news is that Neuromancer has a reasonable chance of being adapted to the screen. Apple TV+ may not be the leading force in streaming entertainment today, but it’s established a track record of producing high-quality material and taking some risks along the way. I know I sound like the eternal fanboy when I say this, but, “This time it might be real.”

Neuromancer is a brilliant novel, one of my favorites, and by my lights, the book that rearranged science fiction. Just as Raymond Chandler did not invent the hard-boiled detective novel, William Gibson did not invent cyberpunk. But both authors took earlier bricklaying done by them and other writers, pulled it all together, and buffed the final result to a chrome-like sheen. There’s science fiction before Neuromancer, and there’s science fiction after Neuromancer.

Hence Neuromancer on film has been a hot topic among science fiction fans since the book was first published in 1984. Every few years over the subsequent decades, news would percolate up that a movie adaptation was in the works, only for the organizers to lose interest, fail to find finding, or simply not get the green light. The Wikipedia section on Neuromancer‘s numerous aborted film adaptations doesn’t do justice to its rocky history. Fake movie trailers have been sewn together; fan-made movie posters have been photoshopped. The rumors, anticipation, and disappointments surrounding the film’s production are legion. (My response to hearing of this latest adaptation attempt: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”)

There were several sidelights along the road to this moment, starting with Johnny Mnemonic in 1996. At first glance, it appeared the perfect aperitif for Neuromancer fans: Mnemonic was an adaptation of a Gibson short story set in the same story universe. The film landed flat, though, and is pretty grating to watch. (Some call it a cult classic—I can’t tell if they’re being ironic or not). Keanu Reeves turned in a cold performance (which he claims was intentional) within a confounding and bizarrely campy narrative. Some say Mnemonic was underfunded. Gibson said it was overfunded. Even if the studio execs were clueless in their meddling—not a stretch to imagine—I still think postmodernist director Robert Longo was simply in over his head.

(That said, I’ve not seen the new re-edit Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White, so I’ll reserve judgment whether the film is irredeemable. I admit: The stills look damn promising.)

Movie still from Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White
Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White

It took The Matrix (1999) to give hungry cyberpunks the cinematic meal they were waiting for. There’s so many parallels between it and Neuromancer, you can’t help but think the writing/directing Wachowskis owe Gibson a pitcher of beer (if not a brewery). But Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) was on to something when, after viewing the film, he claimed “Cyberpunk? Done.” By using up Neuromancer‘s best devices, as well as every philosophical question explored by Philip K. Dick, the Wachowskis came close to shutting the door on the most interesting development in genre fiction since the 1930s. The banality and repetitiousness of the next three Matrix films—including 2021’s Resurrections, which I held a sliver of hope for—only seemed to cement Aronofsky’s point.

(Cyberpunk’s heyday in the 1990s has passed, but neo-cyberpunk lives. The new breed exists where a worldwide computer network is no longer an imagined future, but a concrete element of the story’s past.)


I’m perennially suspicious of Hollywood adapting books to the screen, especially science fiction. Too often screenwriters will ditch the most memorable and gripping parts of the source material to slide in Tinseltown’s tired narrative shorthand. Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle leaps to mind. I’ve not seen the recent adaptation of Foundation, but at least one reviewer thinks Asimov’s classic hasn’t actually been adapted. Still, Illuminerdi reports William Gibson is signed on as an executive producer for Neuromancer. That gives me a touch more confidence in the direction of the project.

But only a touch. In 2015, I wrote how Hollywood has abandoned “‘tight, gapless screenwriting’ to scripts focused on world-building, sequels, expansion, rebooting.” That was written in time when superhero franchises were claiming greater real estate at the cineplexes, and Hollywood had finished converting Tolkien’s charming tale about wee folk into a eight-hour epic-action trilogy. Cinema houses still ruled back then. Like a sneeze coming on, the theater owners knew a violent upheaval was imminent. Today, streaming services are the premier way to deliver movies to eager audiences. And that’s what worries me the most.

MIlla Jovovich as Molly Millions in Neuromancer (fan-made movie poster)

My dread is not that this cyberpunk classic will be adapted to television instead of the silver screen—it’s to see it adapted to a medium that expects seasons and episodes. As with High Castle and Foundation, the streaming services love season-long episodic television: All the better for binge-watching.

Episodic television ushers in the narrative shorthand that Neuromancer absolutely does not need: every hour ending on a contrived cliffhanger; the sexual tension of when-will-they-hook-up; the let-down of the couple separating (complete with the trite break-up language of television: “I need some space” or, “This is going too fast”); and so on.

As Rob Bricken noted in his review of Foundation, which was serialized for Apple TV+:

Even if you’re coming in without having read a page of Asimov, you’ll still notice the drawn-out plots that go nowhere, the padding, and the weird choices the show has the characters make to keep the plot from moving forward. Cheap, nonsensical melodrama fills the series…The show also wants to have pew-pew laser battles and ship fights and spacewalk mishaps and junk, none of which offer anything you haven’t seen before, and are usually used to just run out the clock anyway.

He makes this sharp observation:

Then there’s the show’s terror that people might not make certain connections, so it shows something, has the character comment on it to themself, and then maybe throws in a flashback to someone saying something relevant even if it was said three minutes prior.

This comes from television writing 101: “Tell them what they’re going to see, show it to them, and then tell them what they saw.” If that sounds like how to organize a Powerpoint presentation, you’re right. It’s also why television writing in 2022 remains hard-wired to the narrative structures of I Love Lucy.

Just as Gibson’s console jockeys rewired systems to hijack signal broadcasts and repurposed wet-tech to bore holes through firewalls, let’s hope modern streaming technology is bent to Neuromancer‘s whims, and not vice-versa.


Addendum: One of the criticisms I’ve received, here and elsewhere, is that Neuromancer cannot properly be condensed into a two-hour movie, hence a series is a better fit for its adaptation.

I agree a multi-part show is appropriate for Neuromancer‘s intricate story line. I loathe condensing Neuromancer into a ninety-minute film almost as much as I loathe seeing Neuromancer: Season Two on my TV screen. However, when I originally wrote the above post, I kept fishing around for a good example of a multi-episode streaming series (for illustrative purposes), and failed to locate one.

This morning I recalled The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (which started life on FX and moved to Netflix). Its miniseries format would work well for Neuromancer. Each segment builds the story and develops characters toward a conclusion, like chapters in a novel. There’s a beginning, a middle, and a door-closing end.

My gripe is that Apple TV+ may attempt to “episodize” Neuromancer, making it more like a soap opera or a recurring show than a single story told a chapter at a time. This is what happened to Man in the High Castle—which was more “inspired by” than a retelling of the source material—and what appears happened to Foundation.

Follow-up: “One year later: Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?”

Why I Wrote “A Man Named Baskerville”

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page
for more information on this series.


A Man Named Baskerville by Jim Nelson

[Note: The following is adapted and compressed from the afterword to A Man Named Baskerville. It reveals some details from the book. It also contains spoilers to the book it was inspired by, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.]

Years ago, while traveling Japan via its Shinkansen bullet train, I found myself without a book to read. An ebook reader I’d installed on my phone came with a free sample to whet the reader’s appetite. That book was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of the earliest Holmes short stories. (I explore this incident in greater detail in my 2016 post “Sherlock by Train.”)

The collection stands as a record of a remarkably creative streak. So remarkable, if Doyle were to have stopped writing after its publication, we would still be talking about his literary creation and storytelling prowess. The titles of the stories within are as familiar as the books of the Bible: “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Perhaps the only missing short story title of comparable infamy is “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” published in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes a mere two years later. In toto, they represent the height of Doyle’s powers and inventiveness.

None of this inspired me to write A Man Named Baskerville. As exciting and inventive as a great Sherlock Holmes story can be, never have I entertained the question that has dogged countless other producers of Doyle homages and pastiches: Could I write my own Sherlock Holmes story? Honestly, the thought has never crossed my mind.

After consuming the first collection in a rush of reading, I used the opportunity of a brief train stop and some free wireless Internet access to download more Sherlock Holmes books for our continued journey. I had read a little of Doyle’s work before, and never found much interest in it. They were too Victorian for my tastes, too concerned with Empire and upright decency and British morality. My California upbringing, and the plain-speaking tastes I inherited from my parents, led me to the hardboiled school of Chandler, Hammett, and Cain. Nathanael West’s grotesqueries and William Gibson’s cyberpunks are a better fit for me than Holmes’ Irregulars.

On that train ride, my interest in Sherlock Holmes kindled. Holmes may not have walked Chandler’s mean streets, but he did present a more compelling moral force than I’d sensed before. As with the hardboiled school, Holmes time and again must balance his own sense of justice against the British legal system’s notion of the same. Doyle wrote for an audience who would understand those boundaries implicitly. A hundred and ten years later, I viewed Holmes’ sense of justice through a different lens. This came to a point when my reading reached The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The book was first serialized in 1901, ten years after that auspicious run of early short stories. Doyle had killed off Holmes in “The Final Problem” (1893) hoping to rid himself of the literary creation upstaging all his other work. An appalled public demanded more stories featuring Holmes, and publishers increasingly pressured Doyle to satisfy the market’s cravings.

Inspired by a trip to Devon and its local folklore of wisht hellhounds roaming the countryside at night, Doyle produced The Hound of the Baskervilles. To avoid what we today call “continuity problems,” he retroactively dated its events to October 1888, three years before the publication of his earliest stories. This places the story square in the middle of the Autumn of Terror, when a serial killer dubbed Saucy Jack terrified London, while, across the Atlantic, the Empire of Brazil was warily beginning its dissolution.

One overlooked quality of Doyle’s writing is that his knack for concise storytelling in the short form executes equally brilliantly in the longer form. I’ve seen adept short story writers get fouled up when they attempt to tackle the novel. The pacing and breathing cadences that permit a runner to win the 100-meter dash do not sustain when attempting a marathon. Yet Doyle’s economical style holds up with Hound, making for dazzling quick cuts between crucial scenes, and exposition that does not lead the reader to impatiently flip ahead. Doyle had a gift for paring down prose to its vital emotional and informational elements without stripping it of that uniquely English sense of mood and atmosphere. One also sees in Hound Doyle’s assiduous control of pacing. The early chapters draw out their eerie scenes, while the closing chapters barrel headlong toward the conclusion. The movement becomes so breathless at the end, it takes pure inference on the part of the reader to detect scene changes.

Readers either love or hate this no-nonsense approach to storytelling. Either way, the final output of his opus on the moors is consistent with this quality, and obviously has held the public’s interest for well over a century.

None of this inspired me to write this book, either. I grew to admire Doyle’s writing while traveling by bullet train, but I never craved to imitate it. The first fourteen chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles served to reaffirm my growing estimation of the man’s talents, but not to pick up a pen.

What did inspire me to write A Man Named Baskerville? The fifteenth and final chapter of the book it derives from.

All detective mysteries deal in sleight-of-hand. Keeping the perpetrator out of the narrative limelight until the moment the solution is announced is a tried-and-true technique for maintaining the element of surprise. In response, savvy readers have learned to guess whodunnit by evaluating how much “screen time” the author gives the suspects. The most obvious suspect is never culpable. The suspect we’ve read the least about is quite often guilty up to their eyeballs.

First edition cover of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
First edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles

And that’s pretty much the case in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The perpetrator is one we hear precious little about, an absentminded collector of butterflies and moths named Jack Stapleton who lives with his sister (the nineteenth-century equivalent to rooming in your parents’ basement, apparently). He’s not the least elaborated-upon character in the book, but he is pictured as far removed from the crimes and the curse of the Baskervilles. When Holmes and Watson finally suspect his guilt, Doyle spends no time speculating on his motivations in favor of keeping the story moving at a brisk clip.

Doyle knew the reader would eventually demand to know why Stapleton posed under an assumed identity to murder his uncle in such a contrived way, and then attempt the same on his cousin. To sew things up, in Chapter 15, Watson calls on Holmes to explain the background of Jack Stapleton. Holmes launches into fourteen pages of exposition, a matter-of-fact recounting of Rodger’s life from the New World to Devonshire, England.

Much detail is omitted, of course, but Holmes’ reckoning of Rodger’s life is a far more plumbed-out biography than I think any reader expected. After all, Holmes could have simply stated, “He was raised abroad and returned to England to kill his uncle and claim his estate.” Yes, that could be worded more artfully, but Doyle stretched himself to fill in the blanks.

I don’t know why Doyle felt the need to so thoroughly detail Rodger Baskerville’s life. I’m not sure anyone does. In my research for A Man Named Baskerville, I never located a definitive answer to the question. Perhaps in Doyle’s papers, or in a complete treatise on his life and work, an answer may be found. Perhaps it was a modernist faith in the triumph of reason—all things must be explained that can be explained—that led Doyle to stretch himself, much as he uses many pages to lay out the backstory in A Study in Scarlet and some of his short stories.

What I do know is, reading those seemingly superfluous fourteen pages of Rodger’s life struck me as a kind of boggy sinkhole in the tale. It felt Arthur Conan Doyle had wanted to write two books, Rodger’s life story and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unable or uninterested in writing the first, he wrote the latter and included a précis of the former in the final chapter.

Fascinated, I made copious notes of Holmes’ reckoning of Rodger’s life. Later, I transferred and organized them on my computer. A bell tinkled in my mind, a Pavlovian reaction all writers develop: Is there a novel here? I let the idea stew. Holmes’ reckoning might appear a rich vein to mine, but once I started digging, it might yield little more than a couple of small gems.

And how would readers react to Rodger as a main character? Yes, everyone says they like stories about villains—but too often those so-called villains are more like lovable rogues or bad boys with a soft spot. Was I trying to humanize Rodger Baskerville? That’s exactly what a novel does: It humanizes. Would it be a Victorian “Sympathy for the Devil”?

Maybe, I thought, I should just write the damn thing and see what comes out of the keyboard.

I made a private agreement with myself: I would not write yet another pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, of which there are plenty to pass around. The book would be told in Rodger’s voice and not in imitation of Doyle’s Watson. Of course, that didn’t excuse me from the challenges of writing a historical novel, which include diction, grammar, tone of voice, colloquialisms, and historical accuracy. Nor could I write such a book without featuring Holmes and Watson at some point.

Mostly, though, my doubts centered on originality. Certainly someone had executed on this idea since the publication of Doyle’s book. Internet searches yielded nothing of the sort.

It became a secret too juicy to keep to myself: In the final chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle embedded a working outline for a novel—a rousing novel, in my estimation—that had been overlooked for over a century. It took me five years to set aside my private doubts and write it.

Yes, it was exhilarating to liberally borrow from a master’s synopsis and expand it into this novel. No, having said synopsis to work from did not make my job any easier.

When I planned A Man Named Baskerville, I failed to see how a man with Rodger’s background would not bring to Dartmoor one or more Central or South American dialects along with his impeccable upper-class English accent. He would also bring with him a rich and varied New World culture as his starting point of reference.

Once in England, around his neck would be the weight of several albatrosses: His father’s suspicious exile; his “ethnic” upbringing and foreign tongue; his lack of secure income; his marriage to a dusky woman most un-Anglo-Saxon. Only his upper-crust accent would save him. It would work in the British Isles like a charge card with no spending limit. After all, he didn’t merely fool the English into thinking he was one of them; he fooled them into thinking he was better than most of them.

Freud’s narcissism of small differences is an underappreciated observation of the continuing human condition. As long as people lift themselves up by cataloging their differences with outsiders, there will always be Rodger Baskervilles walking among us.

That’s why I wrote A Man Named Baskerville.

Twenty Years Later: B. R. Myers, A Reader’s Manifesto

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on this series.


Twenty years ago this month, The Atlantic published a critical essay on the then-current state of American prose. As dry and dusty a topic that sounds—doubly so when published by an august New England monthly—the essay improbably became a cultural sensation, triggering op-eds in international newspapers, vitriolic letters-to-the-editor, and screechy denunciations from professional reviewers. Suddenly readers everywhere were debating—of all things—the modern novel.

Writer B. R. Myers unexpectedly touched a raw nerve in an America that was better-read than the literati believed possible. “A Reader’s Manifesto” dissected without mercy the work of such literary lights as Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson. Myers didn’t merely criticize their prose on terms of its grammar and diction. He attacked these writers on grounds of pretentiousness, and accused the literary establishment of abetting their ascendancy.

Charged stuff, but still very inside baseball. To rouse an impassioned response from readers over books like White Noise and Snow Falling on Cedars was a remarkable moment in American culture. It’s all the more notable a moment considering some of the above authors’ books satirize the inanity of American culture.

Looking back, it seems dream-like for a critical examination of literary novels to ignite such a furor. I can’t imagine such a thing happening today. Then again, it seemed equally unimaginable twenty years ago.

History of Manifesto

Fed-up with fawning reviews of works like Timbuktu and All the Pretty Horses, Myers first wrote his manifesto in 1999. Using careful, reasoned prose punctuated with wit and scathing humor, he roasted passages from prize-winning books—passages which had been the subject of so much praise by literary reviewers as examples of masterful writing. Using tried-and-true close-reading techniques, he punctured these writers’ obtuse and repetitive language to reveal their prose to be turgid, meaningless, and pretentious.

Myers was convinced no magazine or newspaper would publish his critique. He was an unknown in the literary world; a near-anonymous monograph on the quality of modern literary prose hardly promises to fly off bookstore shelves.

So Myers did what many writers would do in later years: He self-published his manifesto on Amazon. He titled it Gorgons in the Pool: The Trouble with Contemporary “Literary” Prose after a particularly choice passage in a Cormac McCarthy novel. “Nothing happened,” he later wrote. “I went online and ordered three copies for myself; they were the only ones ever sold.”

One of the copies he mailed out wound up in the hands of an Atlantic editor, who offered to publish rather than review it. The Atlantic demanded severe cuts and revisions, and the version published in the magazine comes off nastier than he’d intended. He also had the gut-wrenching task of waving off the Times Literary Supplement from publishing a review of Gorgons, as he’d already signed a contract with The Atlantic. (“As someone said to me the other day, ‘How do you know [Times Literary Supplement] wasn’t going to tear you apart?'” he later remarked. “I suppose everything worked out for the best.”) Bad timing would develop into a cadence for Manifesto.

Gorgons in the Pool by B. R. Myers

The Atlantic article, tucked away deep inside the July/August double-issue, improbably made Myers a name-brand overnight among contemporary lit readers and writers. His outsider status only buffed his credentials as a hard-nosed reviewer. Even his use of first initials added a mysterious air to his origins. Although he received praise from many quarters, it mostly came from readers and (interestingly) journalists, a profession notorious for attracting writers shut-out of the book publishing world.

Although the literati initially ignored the essay, drumbeats of support from readers for Myers basic thesis—modern lit is pretentious—soon couldn’t be denied. Much of the early criticism directed back at Myers originated from book reviewers, book supplement editors, and literary novelists. Some of it was quite vitriolic, outraged anyone could suggest the writers he selected weren’t unassailable geniuses. Many exuded an air of befuddled annoyance: How could anyone give Myers or his thesis an ounce of credence? A few were outright smug about it, as though their refutations slammed the door on Myers and put an end to the dreary affair once and for all.

It didn’t work. The rebuttals only stoked increased support for Myers from readers around the world. The back-and-forth debate raged online and, as a mark of the times, across letters-to-the-editor pages, which printed point and counterpoint letters for weeks. This simply did not happen, even in a time when most people had their news delivered to them via bicycle.

Frustrated, the literary professional class took up what is today recognized as a surefire stratagem for shutting down an Internet debate: They doxxed him.

Not exactly—while The New York Times Book Review didn’t print Myers’ phone number and street address, they did see fit to delve into his past for anything incriminating (much like the Twitterati today will dumpster-dive people’s feeds to dig up embarrassing tweets from eight years ago). Demonstrating the ethics of a tabloid reporter, editor Judith Shulevitz dished to her readers that Myers was a foreigner (he’s not) who lived in New Mexico (i.e., not New York City) and was at that moment preparing to spend a year in Seoul “teaching North Korean literature to the South Koreans.” (Myers’ response: “I would probably have described my job in a way less calculated to evoke the phrase ‘selling ice to the eskimos.'”)

Shulevitz wrote Myers “is not just a man without a stake in the literary establishment. He is foreign to it in every way.” His manifesto could have

proved that a critic needs nothing more than taste to make a case. Does Myers’s essay do all this? It does not, because Myers doesn’t have a sure grasp of the world he’s attacking.

Most of the denunciations of Manifesto are steeped in this kind of a haughty condescension, and it served Myers well.

(I should add that I’m uncomfortable throwing around the phrase “literary establishment” as a catch-all for a wide and disjointed segment. Yet Shulevitz seemed comfortable acknowledging its existence in 2001, so I’ll assume it existed then and exists today.)

Manifesto continued to be a lodestone of bad timing. The Times‘ nativist pillorying of Myers was published on September 9, 2001. Two days later, the Times—and the rest of the world—was focused on a very different subject. The literary debate Myers had sparked that summer ground to a halt.

The history of Manifesto could easily have ended with the attacks on the World Trade Center, if not for events which nudged a little harder on the snowball Myers had started rolling in 1999.

First was Oprah selecting Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for her book club. To get an idea of how close this shaved against Myer’s Manifesto—and his continued game of footsie with bad timing—the same edition of the New York Times Book Review that exposed Myers as a Korean-teaching foreigner also included a glowing review of The Corrections laden with an irony of Oedipal proportions: The reviewer gives a winking approval that the book contains “just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won’t assign it and ruin Franzen’s street cred.” Actually, Oprah was set to announce The Corrections as her next book club pick four days later (only to postpone it due to 9/11). When Franzen bristled that Oprah was attempting to smarten-up her book club by associating it with the “high-art literary tradition,” a new literary controversy erupted to displace Manifesto.

Although the imbroglio between Oprah and Franzen is better framed as tabloid-level tit-for-tat, Manifesto played a minor role. Online commenters made the point that Myers’ gripes about the literary establishment sneering down on the reading public were playing out before the nation’s eyes. Gone was his critics’ suggestion that, on this point, Myers was jousting with windmills.

The second event was Melville House publishing A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose in 2002 (one of the two first books produced by the then-fledgling publisher). This full-length treatment gave Myers the opportunity to restore much of what was lost from Gorgons in the Pool when it was adapted for The Atlantic. It’s this edition I’ve based this review on.

The backward glance

The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2001
The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2001.

I vividly recall reading “Manifesto” in the summer of 2001. I’d written my first novel and was discovering the ego-melting process called “finding a literary agent.” Over the prior years I had enrolled in evening and weekend creative writing courses around the Bay Area, where many of the books Myers lay judgment upon were held up as models exemplar. Also at the time I was a member of a weekly “writers’ reading group.” A member of the group handed me a Xerox of The Atlantic essay along with a half-joking warning not to take anything this Myers guy has to say too seriously.

I wound up taking B. R. Myers quite seriously. I had never read anything like “A Reader’s Manifesto.” Rereading Myer’s book for this post, I still marvel over his concision and convictions. It can be read in a single sitting, and unless you’re a grump, it will keep you engaged from start to finish. Myers understands well the game he’s taken up: He can’t poke a stick at others’ bad prose if his own prose is lacking. His manifesto is meticulous, refreshing, lively, and enlightening, as seen here when he trains his gimlet eye on McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:

As a fan of movie westerns I refuse to quibble with the myth that a rugged landscape can bestow an epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But as Conrad understood better than Melville, the novel is a fundamentally irreverent form; it tolerates epic language only when used with a selective touch. To record with the same majesty every aspect of a cowboy’s life, from a knife-fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch.

Not only is this arguable, there’s a lot packed in there to argue with: I find this to be a positive.

Or here, where he’s analyzing David Guterson’s output:

…a slow tempo is as vital to his pseudo-lyrical effects as a fast one is to Proulx’s. What would otherwise be sprightly sentences are turned into mournful shuffles through the use of tautology. “Anything I said was a blunder, a faux pas,” “a clash of sound, discordant,” “She could see that he was angry, that he was holding it in, not exposing his rage,” “Wyman was gay, a homosexual,” and so on.

This level of tight engagement with the work at hand shows this is well above the usual culture-war crap that’s saturated our nation’s dialogue for decades now.

Some of his lines of attack are novel. Performing a close and scathing read of Annie Proulx’s self-approving dedication in Close Range (“my strangled, work-driven ways”) is the kind of antic you’d expect of the University Wits or Alexander Pope. His oft-quoted rejoinder to an exchange between Oprah and Toni Morrison is his most acidic and least endearing: “Sorry, my dear Toni, but it’s actually called bad writing.” (Less oft-quoted is his explanation: “Great prose isn’t always easy but it’s always lucid; no one of Oprah’s intelligence ever had to puzzle over what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.”)

Regardless of what you might have read elsewhere, the boilerplate attacks on Myers don’t stand up to scrutiny. Supposedly he values plot over form; he disdains “difficult” books; he cherry-picked bad passages from the books he attacks; he selected writers who’d gone out of fashion; or the confounding claim that he’s a humorless cur prone to sarcasm and snide shots. Having read his book at least four times now, I say none of these complaints hold water. (Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but it’s not humorless.) I’m not saying there’s no room for criticizing Manifesto, only that dismissing Myers without engaging his points is not fruitful.

And there’s plenty in Manifesto for writers to take away. Rather than being satisfied with throwing spitballs at modern lit, he contrasts prose he finds vapid with prose that stands up. Myers will forever get grief for quoting Louis L’Amour’s Hondo with approval, but the passage he includes is a model of clean, effective writing that succeeds in characterizing the protagonist with the deftness of a parable. Myers makes the point several times that the prose he’s complaining about could have been written with less-pompous English, and takes a few stabs at editing it as proof. He’s engaged with the texts under the gun, a marked difference from his critics who sniff down on him (and, it seems, cannot be bothered to quote and refute his specific claims).

My take-away from Manifesto for writers is, don’t produce affected writing, produce affecting writing: Language that stirs the reader and shines a light rather than obscures. Good editing requires close reads of your prose, and questioning what every word is doing in a sentence. Ditch the idea that affecting prose is “easy” and affected prose is “difficult,” an avant-garde pose. One critic complained “‘prose,’ for [Myers], equals syntax plus diction, and is expected to denote, rather than to evoke.” I think he expects it to do both.

Revolt of the reading public

The significance of Myer’s Manifesto is not a perverse thrill of taking down holy cows like McCarthy and DeLillo, but how eerily it presaged the next twenty years in American publishing. The circuitous route Myers followed from Gorgons in the Pool to The Atlantic Monthly to Melville House is a once-in-a-generation aberration, but the elements of getting said critique out of the word processor and into the hands of readers rings awfully familiar today.

When I read in 2002 of Myers self-publishing Gorgons on Amazon, I was floored: I had no idea such an opportunity was available to mere mortals. It was a bona fide light-bulb moment, the first time I pondered the possibility of making an end-run around the New York City publishers and selling my work directly to readers. Ten years later, not only was Amazon still open to self-publishing, the company was rapidly tooling up to make publishing your own e-book as easy as clicking a mouse button.

Less obvious today, but notable in 2001, was Myers praising Amazon user reviews (of the books Myers was criticizing, not his own overlooked Gorgons). Before Manifesto, any reference in the popular media to Amazon’s user reviews was bound to be dismissive or sardonic. Back then, cultural commentators saw putting opinion-making into the hands of readers as ludicrous as a truck driver penning a starred Michelin review. (Don’t forget, there were still people in 2001 arguing the Internet was a passing fad—that it was faster to drive to the bookstore and buy a book than for Amazon to deliver it, ergo Amazon’s days were numbered.) Myers didn’t merely approve of Amazon user reviews, he used them as evidence that readers can and do understand difficult literature. I believe this is the first time I saw anyone in the cultural sphere do this.

Self-publishing; “average people” versus the experts; the power of reader reviews; the pseudo-doxxing Myers was subjected to; online discussion boards keeping the debate alive; and vitriolic denunciations from on high. All that’s missing is a hash tag and some Bitcoin changing hands, and the dust-up around Manifesto would sound like any number of social media episodes we’ve seen in recent years.

Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public deserves mention here. Although I’ve not read it, I have read plenty of reviews and analyses, simply because this 2014 book is claimed to have predicted the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, cancel culture, the Capitol Hill attacks, QAnon, #MeToo, and more. (It too was self-published on Amazon.)

Gurri’s thesis is that the Internet is destabilizing public respect for institutional authority and, in due course, undermining the authorities’ control over social and political narratives. The expert class, once considered the final word, now must defend itself from an increasingly skeptical public.

It seems to me that the narratives being disrupted by digital communications may not merely be political narratives but also traditional ones—the narratives offered by the literary novel, and the narratives sold to the public by the literary expert class. Not only are big-name authors being treated with skepticism by the general public, so are the stories they’re proffering as significant both in terms of literary heft and their cultural insights. Look no further than the controversy surrounding last year’s American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins for an example of voices from below shouting up at the ensconced above, or the backlash suffered by Sarah Dessen after shaming a critical reader.

The disruption to the literary world even extends to novelists’ fawning reviewers. There is less distinction here than would first appear: Literary novels are often reviewed by other literary novelists. This incestuousness would be a scandal in other fields. “Imagine what would happen if the Big Three were allowed to review each other’s cars in Consumer Reports,” Myers noted in an interview. “They’d save the bad reviews for outsiders like the Japanese.”

A before-and-after example of the Internet’s effect on the publishing world is Lorenzo Carcaterra’s Sleepers (1995) and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). Both were mega-bestsellers whose publication dates bookend the Internet’s ascension in daily life. Both were published as memoirs, and both had their factual accuracy challenged. The mass media reported the controversy around Sleepers by copy-and-pasting publisher press releases and quoting book agents. A Million Little Pieces was put under the Internet’s collective magnifying glass thanks to an investigation by the amateur web site The Smoking Gun.

This people-powered exposé became a nightmare for James Frey, and his reputation never recovered. Editions of A Million Little Pieces (another Oprah book club pick!) now include a publisher’s note warning of “certain embellishments” and “invented” details: “The reader should not consider this book anything other than a work of literature.”

Carcaterra largely escaped unscathed in 1995 thanks to the controversy being framed by the media as a publishing industry squabble. Sleepers remains sold as memoir. (Funnily enough, it’s also listed under Amazon’s “Hoaxes & Deceptions” category.) Carcaterra’s luck can be measured in years. If Sleepers had been a bestselling memoir in 2005, the Internet would have torn it to shreds.

“Leaders can’t stand at the top of pyramids anymore and talk down to people,” Martin Gurri writes. “The digital revolution flattened everything.” I say A Reader’s Manifesto was the initial deflating puncture of the literary world’s cozy status quo.

Engendered reputations

In the conclusion of Manifesto, Myers writes:

I don’t believe anything I write will have much effect on these writers’ careers. The public will give them no more thought in twenty years than it gives, say, Norman Rush today, but that will have nothing to do with me, and everything to do with what engendered their reputations in the first place.

(If you’re wondering who Norman Rush is, I confess I had to look him up myself.)

Some of the rebuttals directed at Myers in 2001 claimed a few of these authors were already “on their way out,” although each critic seemed to formulate a different list of who remained relevant and who was exiting stage left. I’m tempted to produce a list of the writers whose work Myers criticized to see where their reputations stand today. I won’t do that; any reader so inclined could make such a list on their own.

I will point out that some of Myers’ subjects have sunk into a comfortable life of teaching, penning the occasional pop culture piece, and a general resting upon of laurels. Myers makes a couple of pointed barbs about Old Man and the Sea, but at least Hemingway was still throwing left-hooks at the end of his life.

(When Myers’ critics claim that literary book awards and glowing reviews in highbrow magazines are meaningless, or that Myers ignored genre fiction’s own system of awards and reviews, they’re overlooking the enduring social capital of “literary significance.” A science-fiction writer receiving big-time accolades in 2001 is not going to be, in 2021, a tenured professor traveling the writer’s retreat circuit as a featured speaker and penning fluffy think pieces for Harper’s. The self-propelling feedback loop that is the literary world should not be discounted.)

Note that Myers leaves unsaid what exactly engendered these authors’ reputations in the first place. The optimist in me thinks he’s referring to the evanescence of their writing postures—live by the sword, die by the sword.

The pessimist in me suspects what really engendered their reputations is a resilient enabling literary class which eagerly maintains its country-club exclusivity while claiming commitments to diversity. Even in the face of a massive shift in digital publishing, and the concomitant explosion of voices now available via e-books and print-on-demand, the literary establishment remains a closed shop. Its reviewers walk hand-in-hand with big publishers, who in turn regularly ink seven-figure publishing deals and expect a return on said investment. Positive reviews in well-placed periodicals are an important component of any publishing marketing plan. (The podcast “Personal Rejection Letter” explored this question in 2017, along with a retrospective of Myer’s Manifesto.)

In other words, the authors Myers put under the microscope may or may not be relevant twenty years later, but the system that held them aloft remains alive and strong. The Internet has kneecapped it some—the literary establishment is less commanding than it once was—but it’s still humming along.

Could Myers have at least shifted the conversation? I say he did. While Jonathan Franzen’s 1996 “Perchance to Dream” (re-titled “Why Bother?”) and Tom Wolfe’s 1989 “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” are both considered modern literary manifestos of great import, it’s plain to me that Myers’ Manifesto has shown far more staying power in the public’s and writers’ consciousness. Even in a 2010 critical response to B. R. Myers review of Franzen’s Freedom, the comments section swings back and forth on the significance of Myer’s Manifesto, with the most recent comment coming in 2016. There are YouTube videos produced as late as last year going over the debate Myers ignited twenty years ago.

Meanwhile, in creative writing courses across America, mentioning Myers’ name will still earn an eye-roll and a dramatic sigh from the instructor, wordlessly asking when this guy will just go away.