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For "player hating" at its best, check out writer Daniel Mendelsohn's acid spew all over Jonathan Franzen's book The Discomfort Zone in the current New York Times. I haven't read the book but the review gives me hives. Mendelsohn goes right for the personal, zeroing in on Franzen's pop culture breakthrough moment, the supposed gaffe in declining to be an "Oprah author," while brushing past the merits of that controversy. For concern troll Mendelsohn, what made Franzen a "tragic" figure wasn't that TV triumphed over literature but that Franzen lost book sales. So, is Mendelsohn reviewing a book or an individual? The latter--he never lets up. One might expect a memoir written by a fiction writer to shade truth with some degree of persona fabrication. Yet to Mendelsohn, Franzen is simply "self-involved," with a "humorless" authorial voice that irks him mightily. Without reflecting on how his own buttons might be getting pushed (maybe it's, you know, craft, or maybe Mendelsohn's mother is like that), he stays on the ad hominem trail. When Franzen's virtues are mentioned it's usually a setup for another sledgehammer blow.
And Mendelsohn's writing is bad. He describes The Corrections, the Oprah candidate in question, as "an acerbic and often searingly painful dissection of one Midwestern family’s disintegration as its stodgy values [a]re put to the test by the go-go avidity of American culture in the 1990s." "Go-go avidity"? What does that mean? Mendelsohn declares Franzen's "wider failing" to be his "lack of humanizing softness." One wishes Nabokov, Beckett, and Richard Ford could be nicer too--more "human." Mendelsohn spends two paragraphs proving that Franzen is "wrong" about the comic strip Peanuts. He isn't saying that Franzen's identification with Snoopy over Charlie Brown is a failed literary conceit but, rather, a sign of his deep moral failing as a person. Maybe Mendelsohn is right, and the book is Franzen, with no writerly intervention whatsoever. As I said, I haven't read it. Mendelsohn's envy and aggression in the service of increased human sensitivity, however, is something I wish I hadn't read.