Axeman on the rampage

A curious volume, this, and you would be right in thinking that anyone writing a book review of someone else’s book reviews needs to justify himself. (Indeed, the first essay in this book is a review of Sven Birkerts’s book reviews, at which point we seem an unnecessarily remote distance from literature itself — I mean, I’d be thrilled if anyone were interested in my views of Dale Peck’s views of Sven Birkerts’s views of Robert Musil, but you could perfectly well go and read Musil yourself, so let’s not kid ourselves.)

The point about Dale Peck is that he has earned himself a notoriety by writing some fairly unforgiving book reviews. Now, in this country, we are familiar with the truly vicious book review, but much of American literary culture has a sort of glassily polite, Stepford Wives air; if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.