DISCOVERIES

Hatchet Jobs

Cutting Through

Dale Peck

New Press: 240 pp., $23.95

“Hatchet Jobs,” says Dale Peck, “marks my final foray into negative book reviewing.” One shudders to think where all that venom will go. In the New Republic in 2002, he called the untouchable wunderkind Rick Moody (“The Black Veil”) the worst writer of his generation. Moody’s friends gathered instantly, publishing pieces that used offensive terms to describe Peck. Being that boys will be boys (and in the literary world, they can often resemble very little boys), a sort of conversation began about what is snark and what is criticism (mostly between boys and girlfriends of boys). Nothing came of it, except this book, which is quite entertaining and vaguely liberating (especially if opinions have been festering under the reader’s rational facade). Take Peck’s view of author Sven Birkerts (“My Sky Blue Trades”), whose “only subject is himself, the inevitable progression from frog-killing child to book-killing critic,” who “loves the edifice of literature and his own conception of himself as a small but integral part of that edifice,” an “editor’s dream. Need somebody to slog through a second-rate translation of [Osip] Mandelstam’s journals ... and produce two thousand words to fill that big slot in the middle of the book for not very much money to boot? Birkerts is your man.”

He takes on Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” (“annoyingly talky”), David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” (“I resent the five weeks of my life I gave over to reading it”) and on the likes of Jamaica Kincaid, Julian Barnes and Thomas Pynchon; the bigger the hype, the harder they fall. Most fiction today is an “imitation of fiction,” he says. Their words, he says, “describe ‘characters’; [the] characters have detailed ‘histories’; these histories grow sedimentarily into ‘narrative’; but calling that narrative a ‘novel’ is akin to calling a pan of flour and water, dutifully mixed together and baked, ‘bread.’ ” Peck is right when he says that it’s the distance between word and thing, word and emotion that can kill any piece of writing. Writers and readers have to fight hard these days to narrow that distance.

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Scattered Shadows

A Memoir of Blindness and Vision

John Howard Griffin

Orbis Books: 230 pp., $18.95

“Black Like Me,” John Howard Griffin’s 1961 account of his transformation into a black man and his experiences in the segregated South sold 11 million copies in 14 languages. “Scattered Shadows,” his account of a decade of blindness from a war injury, was not published in his lifetime. Much of this posthumous book arranged by Robert Bonazzi is drawn from journal entries, in which he tells not only of his loss of sight at 27 and its return at 37 but also of the miracle of his life’s path. Born in Texas in 1920, Griffin had tired of public school at 15. He spotted an ad for a French boarding school, applied and was accepted. His great love was music, but he studied medicine in Tours and apprenticed with a psychiatrist who believed Gregorian chants could help cure the mentally ill. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941 and was stationed in the Solomon Islands, where he was injured in an air raid. Told his sight would deteriorate and that he would soon be permanently blind, he went to France in 1946 to study composition, then to live and study Gregorian chants with Benedictine monks.

Griffin was driven by a need for solitude and the search for faith as his sight failed. His first novel, “The Devil Rides Outside,” banned in Michigan in 1954 then exonerated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957, described that search. His dark night of the soul continued even as he learned again to read, write and hold a glass. Griffin struggled to get outside himself, to shake “delusion and self aggrandizement,” to see with the purity and clarity he felt in great music. “The true writer, like the true painter, is an observer of all things, and quite especially of himself,” he writes, “but of himself in detachment, as though a part of him stood away and appraised the rest, without love or partiality.” When Griffin’s sight returned in colors and shapes and shadows in 1957, the first thing to emerge was his 2-year-old daughter’s face in all its “radiant wisdom,” which, he writes, was like “looking at the sun.”