This is one way to look at it.

Here’s another: Gawker is to Keith Gessen what Gary Baum was to Dave Eggers.

Granted, the anal­ogy is a stretch, since Gawker pro­fesses none of the open adu­la­tion that Baum had for Eggers. But con­sider this, from Gessen’s 2001* arti­cle on Baum and his FoE! Log. Not only does it read like a recipe for Gawker, but it’s fur­ther proof–as if Gessen’s novel weren’t proof enough–that the fate of sad young lit­er­ary men has always been his subject:

The Log was about fame: the fame that Eggers had and the fame that Gary wanted. It was about the wages of such fame, its con­di­tions, its uses. There were occa­sional lit­er­ary quo­ta­tions in the Log, but they were not from Eggers’s books; there were ref­er­ences to lit­er­ary fig­ures, but only inso­far as their careers were con­cerned. Larger ques­tions were being dealt with here. How does one take the enor­mous appa­ra­tus of celebrity-​creation and force it to do one’s bid­ding? How does one, to put it more suc­cinctly, con­quer the world?

It was a good ques­tion, a Balza­cian ques­tion. And one was struck by the opti­mism of it, the inno­cence. I kept asking Gary whether he’d become dis­en­chanted by the dirty secrets of the lit­er­ary world, whether he still thought it a world worth con­quer­ing. He wasn’t, and he did. Because though Gary proved beyond the doubt of any rea­son­able reader that lit­er­ary fame, and lit­er­a­ture, is a vast and intri­cate con­spir­acy, the trick of the Log was that it wasn’t a con­spir­acy he abhorred. He wanted in, he merely wanted in.

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*Note: The arti­cle was orig­i­nally writ­ten for the Atlantic, but for rea­sons Gessen explains in the post­script, it didn’t appear in print until the first issue of n+1, in the fall of 2004.

Pity the long lead. Quick on the heels of Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic attack on “quirk” comes a sim­i­lar effort by Melvin Jules Bukiet in this month’s Amer­i­can Scholar.

Hirschorn’s piece saw quirk every­where: in books, movies, and pre­em­i­nently in public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life. Bukiet’s arti­cle goes after some­thing he rather clum­sily calls “Brooklyn Books of Wonder”:

Take mawk­ish self-​indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nos­tal­gia, season with magic real­ism, stir in a com­pla­cency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness….BBoWs are escape novels, albeit gar­nished with intel­lec­tual flour­ishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kun­dera defined as “the trans­la­tion of the stu­pid­ity of received ideas into the lan­guage of beauty and feel­ing [that] moves us to tears of com­pas­sion for our­selves, for the banal­ity of what we think and feel.”

But though the éminence grise in Bukiet’s account is Paul Auster, not Ira Glass, it’s clear that he and Hirschorn are talk­ing about the same thing. Sev­eral names (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s) show up in both accounts. And their diagnoses—in Bukiet’s words, vanity mixed with “mock-naïve astonishment”—are pretty much the same.

I wrote before that Hirschorn went too soft on the soft­ies. Bukiet’s not going to let them escape so easily:

Cod­dled and cos­seted, they’re the first gen­er­a­tion of nov­el­ists who grew up read­ing the young-​adult pap that they’ve now regur­gi­tated with a decon­struc­tive gloss learned in col­lege. Of course, such aspi­ra­tions require equiv­a­lently high sub­ject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enor­mity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ cloth­ing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

If Bukiet strikes deeper than Hirschorn, it’s prob­a­bly because he work­ing in fields not far from the better-​known writ­ers he’s aiming at. [Read more]