2 result(s) tagged “Dale Peck”

In April, Rick Moody fulfilled a fantasy that many artists surely have: He delivered a pie to the face of one of his critics.

Moody is probably best known as the author of the 1994 novel from which director Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm was adapted. But he’s also famous in some circles for nine words written about him: “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.”

Those words were the opening line by Dale Peck in a 2002 New Republic review of Moody’s award-winning memoir The Black Veil. Moody is hardly Peck’s only vaunted victim; his reviews were collected in the aptly titled Hatchet Jobs, and he’s similarly disemboweled Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Julian Barnes. But that line is so forceful and unequivocal and personal that the two authors have been inextricably linked in the six years since.

Moody said in a phone interview earlier this month that he hoped the pie would bring some closure.

“I got so tired of hearing about this,” he said. “It seemed as though the remark launched a specific conversation about how the literary world deals with itself. That’s an interesting question, but I was never allowed to really talk about that, because people just wanted a salacious answer to the question: ‘What does it feel like to have this sentence written about you?’ That’s actually a tedious question. ... So when this guy asked me for charity if I would throw this pie at Dale, I guess I felt like I could put the first part to bed.”

The New York Review of Books has an excellent piece in its July 15 issue on the nature of criticism. It deals specifically with Dale Peck’s already notorious Hatchet Jobs — which, of course, I haven’t read — and concerns itself primarily with the role of the critic. The author’s conclusion is that Peck is too busy “punishing” the authors he’s slamming to effectively “judge” them, and that Peck needs to offer an alternative to the books he loathes to be a good critic.