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]

For years I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life was ready for a take­down. Some aspir­ing social critic would come along and dig a dirty nail into the rind of every hipster’s favorite radio show, peel it to show how mawk­ish, vain, and gaw­daw­fully sen­ten­tious the whole pro­duc­tion can be, and even pos­si­bly con­vince some­one at NPR or APM or wher­ever they make these things that yes, in fact, you might be able to do better than Ira Glass. After Curtis White went after Fresh Air and n+1 attacked McSweeney’s, TAL seemed the only low-​hanging fruit left for the knocking. 

Well, here it is, cour­tesy of Michael Hirschorn at The Atlantic.

And though I wish it were oth­er­wise, I can’t say I’m impressed. Forget the coarse and unhelp­ful cat­e­gory of “quirk” (Jonathan Safran Foer shar­ing oxygen with Wes Ander­son?) and the for­mu­la­tions (”TAL…is really the oppo­site of doc­u­men­tary reportage. It’s more like sociology,” ”that hoary emo­tion called sentiment”) that sound as silly as TAL’s own self-​congratulations (”what we’re doing is apply­ing the tools of jour­nal­ism to every­day lives”). The major prob­lem is that Hirschorn only scratches where he ought to maim. As Emer­son told Oliver Wen­dell Holmes: if you strike at a king you must kill him.