Re: RARA-AVIS: Joyce Carol Oates

Robert E. Skinner (rskinner@mail.xula.edu)
Tue, 13 Oct 1998 14:11:32 -0500 < her review is totally humorless...it's an indictment.>

It always is. I've never met a zealot yet who didn't find humor either
inexplicable or subversive--maybe that's why she doesn't like
Chandler--he laughs at nearly everything and everybody, including
himself at one time or another.
>
< From her review, a reader would not get a sense that Chandler is an
exciting writer - or one worth reading.>

That's the real danger, of course. A thinking reader will read such a
review and begin to suspect that if she dislikes it that much, it would
be interesting to see just what Chandler did to set her off so. An
unthinking reader will see what she's written and believe she's the
Gospel. Of course, an unthinking reader might not read the New York
Review of Books--it has too little white space in it.

There's the fact, too, that such an august publisher as the Library of
America would choose Chandler as its first subject from so-called
"popular literature" to earn membership in this prestigious set of
books. It is hard to believe that after all these years, thousands of
words of appreciation by talented writers, stories and novels that never
go out of print, doctoral dissertations that examine him, that there is
someone in the world so befuddled that they DON'T believe that Chandler
is important both as an American novelist as well as a kind of cultural
icon who painted sociological portraits of Los Angeles.

It's probably even more confusing when you know that Oates is an H. P.
Lovecraft admirer who has edited a new collection of his work. Although
I admire Lovecraft myself, he's not in Chandler's league either as a
stylist or as an intellect.

< a weak writer reviews a much greater one and entirely misses the
point. >

I think something happens to a writer's brain when they continually
hear praise and receive rewards for their work--they begin to think
they're the last word on other writers. I've seen it often enough to
worry it might happen to me.

-- 
**************************************
Robert E. Skinner, Director
Xavier University of Louisiana Library
7325 Palmetto Street
New Orleans, LA 70125
(504) 483-7303 (voice)
(504) 485-7917 (FAX)
e-mail: rskinner@mail.xula.edu
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