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george_salis's review against another edition
5.0
Steven Moore, as his surname would suggest, has read more books than you. He has also done more for literature than most people. He was a champion of Gaddis when that writer had precious few champions, becoming something of a world authority on his work; he was the managing editor of Dalkey Archive during its glory days as well as the editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction; he was an early champion of David Foster Wallace and but so was asked by DFW himself to read over the manuscript of Infinite Jest with an editor’s eye (he even played tennis with Wallace!); he reformulated the concept of the novel, writing an alternative and impressively comprehensive history of that great artform across two thick volumes, and much more.
Moore is not in the habit of writing hatchet jobs, which is often the job of the hack, after all (there are some delightful and deserving burns of the kind of lazy writing Moore abhors, though. See the Richard Ford review on page 172). Rather, Moore is about amore, more and more amore. The passion in many of his reviews makes them almost Borgesian, in the sense that a reader can enjoy a book that isn’t being read but read about, like Pierre Menard’s Quixote. Don’t get me wrong, though, because Moore isn’t writing fiction, thus he reviews with clarity in mind, allergic as he is to the willful and obtuse obscurantism of modern academic writing. No, his reviews are straightforward yet infectious in their celebration of language and storytelling.
What kind of language and storytelling, you ask? Put simply, “full-bodied maximalist fiction over thin-blooded minimalism.” (370) Like any serious reader, Moore’s brain is free of “Hemingway’s Disease: the delusion that short, see-Spot-run sentences constitute fine writing, that adjectives and adverbs are crutches only weak writers use, that metaphors are for sissies, and that it’s useful to repeat character’s full names in every sentence.” (298)
Read my full review here (which includes a review of Steve's latest book, Alexander Theroux): https://thecollidescope.com/2020/10/18/my-back-pages-and-alexander-theroux-by-steven-moore/
Moore is not in the habit of writing hatchet jobs, which is often the job of the hack, after all (there are some delightful and deserving burns of the kind of lazy writing Moore abhors, though. See the Richard Ford review on page 172). Rather, Moore is about amore, more and more amore. The passion in many of his reviews makes them almost Borgesian, in the sense that a reader can enjoy a book that isn’t being read but read about, like Pierre Menard’s Quixote. Don’t get me wrong, though, because Moore isn’t writing fiction, thus he reviews with clarity in mind, allergic as he is to the willful and obtuse obscurantism of modern academic writing. No, his reviews are straightforward yet infectious in their celebration of language and storytelling.
What kind of language and storytelling, you ask? Put simply, “full-bodied maximalist fiction over thin-blooded minimalism.” (370) Like any serious reader, Moore’s brain is free of “Hemingway’s Disease: the delusion that short, see-Spot-run sentences constitute fine writing, that adjectives and adverbs are crutches only weak writers use, that metaphors are for sissies, and that it’s useful to repeat character’s full names in every sentence.” (298)
Read my full review here (which includes a review of Steve's latest book, Alexander Theroux): https://thecollidescope.com/2020/10/18/my-back-pages-and-alexander-theroux-by-steven-moore/
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