Bashing Brooklyn
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]
