On the subject of "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It," I don't have a tremendous amount to say which Patrick hasn't already said. The essay, which is very good but which is very much not perfect, which I agree with almost completely but find myself compelled to argue against, suffers from precisely the flaw that rebecca articulated in the comments of Pat's post: the article focuses way too much on Franzen personally and not nearly enough on experimental writing as a worthy literary pursuit in and of itself.

Now by no means do I want to blast the article. I love Ben Marcus. I love that someone is saying these things, and in Harper's, no less. As someone who deeply loves what is called "experimental writing," who reads it for fun and who has even been known to dabble in such a thing from time to time with mixed results, I am beside myself with agreement when I see Marcus say something like, for instance, this:

If literary titles were about artistic merit and not the rules of convention, about achievement and not safety, the term "realism" would be an honorary one, conferred only on writing that actually builds unsentimentalized reality on the page, matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. It would be assigned no matter the stylistic or linguistic method, no matter the form. This, alas, would exclude many writers who believe themselves to be realists, most notably those who seem to equate writing with operating a massive karaoke machine. In such a scheme, Gary Lutz, George Saunders, and Aimee Bender would be considered realists right alongside William Trevor, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro. It would be a title you'd have to work for, and not just one you inherited because you favored a certain compositional style.

This is almost precisely the fine line Patrick and I try to walk with Backwards City Review's fiction: a style that might be called experimental realism, fiction that captures reality but loads the wrong speed film, leaves the apeture too wide, and then overexposes the negative. The stories we want to publish are the stories that surprise us, that work us hard but which in the end point back to something tangible and felt and real. In the fiction department of this magazine he's the neat one and I'm the messy one, he's the realist and I'm, well, not -- and while we're hardly ever on speaking terms, we both hope that the product of our unholy union is something that can't be impaled on either horn of fiction's false dilemna.

In a phrase, George Saunders Is Our King. (And if anyone ever asks you just what the point of BCR is, this is the post to point them to.)

So Marcus starts out saying very good things I agree with completely. Why, then, does the final two-thirds of the essay -- degenerating at one point into a silly strawman over Fog Index readability scores -- become such a petulant Franzenfest? Isn't Franzen completely beside the point? Sadly, Marcus opens himself up to exactly the criticism he tries to slough off with a joke, that he is in fact "the opportunistic writer who tried to take down Franzen, the reigning lit king." The scope of this essay is much bigger and much more important than just countering Franzen's skewed opinions, and I wish Ben Marcus had taken just a moment to reconsider the essay's focus before sending it along.

Besides Franzophobia, the article also suffers from a second, subtler problem, which is that it commits the very sin of self-aggrandizement and self-congratulation that Marcus repeatedly accuses Franzen of. According to Marcus, experimental writers are "striving for individuality", "ambitious" people "who appreciate the artistic achievements of others ubt still dream for [themselves], however foolishly, that new arrangments are possible, new styles, new concoctions of languages that might set off a series of deliciosu mental explosions." In short, they're literary Jesuses, literary saints. It's all a bit much.

But I'm trashing the article again, aren't I? Shit. Look, personally I agree with 99% of what Marcus says and about 5% of what Franzen says. And when Marcus gets going, boy, he really knows how to turn a phrase:

What I find difficult, when I read, is to encounter other people's achievements passed off as one's own. I find it difficult to discover literary tradition so warmly embraced and coddled, as if artists existed merely to have flagrant intercourse with the past, guaranteed to draw a crowd but also certain to cover that crowd in an old, heavy breading. I find it difficult when a narrative veers toward soap opera, when characters are explained by their childhoods, when setting is used as spackle to hold together chicken-wire characters who couldn't even stand up to an artificial wind, when depictions of landscape are intermissions while the author catches his breath and gets another scene ready. I find writing difficult that too readily subscribes to the artistic ideas of other writers, that willingly accepts langauge as a tool that must be seen and not heard, that believes in happy endings, easy revelations, and bittersweet moments of self-understanding. I find writing difficult that could have been written by anyone. That's difficult to me, horribly so. Mr. Difficult? It's not Gaddis. Mr. Difficult is the writer willing to sell short the aims of literature, to serve as its fuming, unwanted ambassador, to apologize for its excesses or near misses, its blind alleys, to insult the reading public with film-ready versions of reality and experience and inner sensations, scenes flying jauntily by under the banner of realism, which lately grants it full critical immunity.

This is good stuff and all exactly correct, and the essay is filled with gems like this. Which is why it's too bad that all anybody's going to remember about this article in a few months is that it was that nasty hit piece on Jonathan Franzen.