Ranting and rating

Anis Shivani's list of the 15 most overrated American writers—including such squint-inducingly bright lights as Jhumpa Lahiri and Mary Oliver —has led to well over 15 pages of comments. For those of you who don't remember the summer's hysteria, Shivani opined:

It's difficult to know [who's good] today because we no longer have major critics with wide reach who take vocal stands. There are no Malcolm Cowleys, Edmund Wilsons, and Alfred Kazins to separate the gold from the sand...As for the reviewing establishment, it is no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing, offering unanalytical "reviews" announcing that the emperor is wearing clothes (hence my inclusion of Michiko Kakutani).

Michik-ow!

Thank God that, in this era of crippled criticism, Internet commenters are so generous with their insights. Amusingly, many of Shivani's take issue with his scathing stance. steveisnothappy writes:

Oh no. Not Helen Vendler. I love her.

But some take it up a notch. Announces kebushima:

Okay, the article is entertaining and amusingly vicious. But most of the writers attacked here are surely third or fourth tier if that.

Now, over at the Prairie Schooner blog, Timothy Schaffert offers his applause.

I like many of the writers Shivani skewers (and admit that some of them I’ve not read), but I’d enjoy it if he skewered even more of my favorites. The list has the quality of a collection of bubblegum cards to be collected and swapped—a literary Wacky Packs. Expand the list to 100 overrated writers!

This kind of vitriol is about as a new as writing itself, Schaffert points out.

In any event, it’s all “useful mischief,” in the words of Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. Yardley, however, was speaking of B.R. Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto,” a previous dressing-down of the literary elite (and rigorously opposed to “pretentious” prose of the high-purple variety, practiced by Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo and other notables) that ran in the Atlantic nearly ten years ago. And Yardley evokes an even older bit of mischief-making: “Panic Among the Philistines: The literary vulgarians,” by Bryan F. Griffin, which ran in Harper’s in 1981, which itself references the earlier kvetchings of Roderick MacLeish (“…have you gotten through Moby Dick more than once?” MacLeish reportedly sneered in the Post) and even earlier, Matthew Arnold (“Ignorance and charlatanism in work of this kind are always trying to pass off their wares as excellent and to cry down criticism as the voice of an insignificant, overfastidious minority”).