The Creative Writing MFA is the singularly most devastating occurrence to hit literature in the 20th century, churning out writers of utterly indistinguishable competence.
I'm referring, of course, to the news that the Orange Prize has been won by Tea Obreht, the "youngest ever recipient" at aged 25 -- her age mentioned in every press-release, as if it might endear or excuse their decision. A plump, blonde, smiling MFA-product, Obreht's debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, has resulted in some astonishingly pretentious bullshit from the critics, to rival the content of her own book. Despite "the occasional whiff of adjectival overexuberance" The Guardian sniffs, in a contemptible piece of writing which makes me want to headbutt the author, The Tiger's Wife is "vivid and limber; a picaresque romp through the fragments of former Yugoslavia." Britain's Evening Standard tells us, without a hint of irony, that "The Tiger's Wife is more than fiction. It is about burying the dead" referring frequently to the book's ability to "heal the international image of her birth country."
I could go on, but I'd rather pluck my own pubic hairs than read this fawning idiocy written by fools who have only read the press release of a novel they probably couldn't get through either.
The problem with The Tiger's Wife is it's unreadable: turgid, overwritten, self-indulgent and in need of a heavy editorial hand, not to mention about 10 years more life experience to give the two-dimensional characters, including an irritatingly earnest narrator, a bit of zap up their winsome asses. It's polished. Obreht can churn out a (very long, overwritten) sentence. It's competent. It's a book.
But my god is it boring.
Worthy, insufferably dull, and an ordeal, it's the kind of book that one reads only because a sibling or loved one wrote it -- that, or you were foolhardy enough to digest the bullshit storm that the literary establishment is currently whipping up in its attempts to make people buy this crap instead of Us Weekly. It's like gagging down spinach when you hate it -- there's plenty of ways to get your intellectual nutrition, other than the bland offerings of the MFA Creative Writing course. It's not as if the consumption of this dreary rubbish will make us into better, more intelligent people: people worthy to sit next to Zadie Smith at dinner, politely and knowledgeably conversing about modern fiction.
And don't get me started on Zadie -- another writer who proved to be a great literary bore. Her essays "On Beauty" were like being forcibly strapped into a Cambridge lecture theater and waterboarded by some bratty, egotistical over-read teen's pompous thesis on art. Shut up Zadie. You're about as entertaining as an enema. The only redeeming feature about Zadie is her great first book, and the fact we can now blame her subsequent foray into mediocrity upon media over-hype and a spell at Harvard.
But back to Tea (who should be friends with Zadie). I'm going to admit now that I haven't read all of The Tiger's Wife. A degree in English Literature has taught me many useful and discerning skills, amongst which is this little gem: if you can't get past page 50, give up. Only in very rare cases has persistence in reading boring literature paid off. I suspect this is not one of them. Why? Because I have read Tea's competent, assured, boring-as-fuck prose before: in a million other aspiring writers churned out by the MFA system, who then go on to take up professions as teachers in the MFA system, passing on their identical mediocrity to a new generation of award-winning identical mediocre visionaries.
Yes, I know that the arguments against MFA's are the old hat now: they promote elitism, no one can 'teach' writing, writers would be better off traveling the world, imbibing a few drugs, having a shag and running out of money than sitting in some stale, forty-thousand dollar a year classroom being taught how to produce such startling unoriginal over-crafted lines as: "These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life." Yada yada yada. But when a literary prize that was once brave enough to award Lionel Shriver's controversial novel We Need To Talk About Kevin -- a book that no publisher, like Lolita, was willing to touch -- has reverted to affirming the essential inanity of the 21st century MFA course, we need to start talking again, a little louder, a little more vociferous.
Far from enticing the general public away from devouring reality TV, telling them that they should regard books like The Tiger's Wife as great works of literature only reconfirms what the suspicious, unread masses have long since suspected: 'literature' is boring, now fuck off and let me watch TOWIE.
Although I earn my living as a screenwriter, books are my first love. It pains me to see that even after centuries confirming that 'the establishment' rarely has its finger on the pulse concerning what will last and endure as great literature, it still insists on pretending otherwise. I personally think we should double the prices of MFA Creative Writing courses, and use the profit to promote literacy and language skills in deprived youth. And then we should make 10 years in the real world compulsory for all writers who have graduated from an MFA course before the age of 25. That's 10 years without access to a trust-fund or Ivy League university or The Guardian (I say The Guardian merely because it annoys me, not for any scientific purpose).
At the end of 10 years, they can submit their work in the proper channels -- i.e. cold calling publishers and agents, not through their academic Pulitzer-prize winning supervisor who knows this dude at The New Yorker. If it's not derivative of Anna Karenina, nor does it feature more than three bad metaphors or similes in the first 50 pages, and upon publication, the media doesn't mention your age nor the three letters M.F.A. -- then you're allowed to exist with the rest of the writing world, submitting your work like anyone else.
Imagine -- Junot Diaz e.t. al might actually be starting to write something decent by now.
Oh how I long for the days of writers like Nabokov: those who hadn't spent five years learning how to put a fucking sentence together, but instead wrote with their guts.
Follow Ruth Fowler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fowlerruth
Mary Kay Andrews: House Porn: Iconic Homes In Literature
Randy Susan Meyers: Why Book Review Equality Matters
Orange Prize for Fiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Novelist Tea Obreht wins Orange Prize For Fiction : NPR
Orange Prize (OrangePrize) on Twitter
http://cmfischer.wordpress.com/
Perhaps use the emotions caused by Obreht's success to fuel your own creative process in a positive way, to produce something that will inspire others, not make them want to avoid your writing completely like this exquisite piece does?
I'm a bit perturbed: both that you thought this was the best way to criticise a novel, and by the standard of editing. Though, frankly, you deserve the editing, since you criticise so heavily the novel's standard of writing.
Danglers galore, confusion around prepositions, sentences without referents, resort to swearing. I can't see Cyril Connolly having written like that. The writing here is simply not assured or interesting enough to support phrases like "competent, assured, boring-as-fuck prose."
"Yada yada yada." This is literary criticism?
And telling someone that you will "have to resort to" calling them names in public? Will you HAVE to? How will it strengthen your position?
So you didn't like the book (enough to read it). There's no law, after all, saying you HAVE to like it; contrary to what you say, no one is telling people they MUST think all prize-winners are "great literature."
Dismissing a writer for being young, blonde, "plump", smiling (in one photo) seems unnecessary in the extreme. You don't say you're a feminist, but it's strange. Why launch a vitriolic, personal attack on a young person whose only crime was to do her best? So the book isn't very good: no one's dead. She'll live a little, and write a better book. Or not.
(N.b., referring to Anis Shivani, clearly a person, as "what," is also rather strange. Just don't call him Shivani, or he might call you a thing too.)
Fowler predicates her argument in this neat little notion of meritocracy entitling one to write, publish, and receive prizes. BS...time sorts that out. As of this moment, I have over three hundred triolets sitting in my office by British writers from the late 19th and early 20th century that no one ever heard of but indeed, these writes have a book...
In short, this kind of argument fears chaos. To blame the immediate context is to miss the forest through the trees.
This is something I have always wondered about. Some people write bad books. This is part of the price we pay for being civilized. Some people are serial killers, some are hedge fund managers, and some write bad books.
There are at least two people who stand between these typing exercises and an unsuspecting public; An agent and an editor. Barring those works by "celebrities" that barely graze an editors desk on their way to Barnes and Noble, how do these things get published?
If bad books were an anomaly we could chalk it up to a handful of editors with drinking problems or unfortunate childhoods. But that is clearly not the case. The sheer volume of this land fill fodder tells us that bad writing is not only tolerated, but encouraged.
What I want to know is, how can I meet these editors? Don't tell me it's just my bad luck and life isn't fair, I know it isn't fair. When I was six years old I watched my father throw my beloved talking Bugs Bunny doll in the trash. I've paid my dues!
It's my turn to go on book tours and do campus readings that lead to unprotected sex with faculty members wives. I may not have talent, but I know what I want and I deserve it.
So I get Fowler's point: Literature too has created a "school" of art that actually subverts and mutes what we look for in great art or at least original art. We now have lots of proficient artists and writers. We now have lots of good art. We just don't have a lot of art that cuts to the core and seres our brains and stands apart from the rest. We've found a cure for the god awful but sacrificed the great for the merely good along the way.