Om sågning

Som uppmärksamma läsare kanske känner till så har jag det senaste årtiondet eller så varit ganska flitig med att författa bokrecensioner. Då och då har detta resulterat i tämligen entydiga sågningar. Till de författare som genom min försorg fått sina böcker sågade någonstans vid fotknölarna (om nu böcker kan sägas ha fotknölar) hör exempelvis Jan Cederquist, Claes Johnson, Alister McGrath, Patricia Fara, Jon Williamson och William Byers. Den som på basis av dessa bokanmälningar drar slutsatsen att jag är en hård recensent må vara förlåten, men jag skyndar mig att tillägga att jag är noga med att vara hård men rättvis.¹ Det är enligt min mening viktigt att inte vara orättvis och rikta hårdare kritik mot en bok än den förtjänar.² Balansgången kan ibland vara knivig, och det gäller att vara vaksam så att man inte rycks med i en överentusiastisk eller rentav sadistisk sågningslusta. Det är nämligen så att sågningar kan vara fruktansvärt roliga. Den allra mest furiöst och underbart roliga totalsågning jag läst är Dale Pecks anmälan av Rick Moodys The Black Veil i tidskriften The New Republic 2002. Pecks text inleds på följande vis.

Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.

I apologize for the abruptness of this declaration, its lack of nuance, of any meaning besides the intuitive; but as I made my way through Moody's oeuvre during the past few months I was unable to come up with any other starting point for a consideration of his accomplishment. Or, more accurately, every other starting point that I tried felt disingenuous, nothing more than a way of setting Moody up in order to knock him down. One of those starting points was this: "Rick Moody is a lot of things, but he is not actually dumb." This was an attempt at charity, and though I still think that it's true enough, I don't think that it matters; at any rate, his intelligence does not make up for the badness of his books. Another attempt: "In his breakthrough novel The Ice Storm, Rick Moody evinces a troubling fascination with adolescent sexual organs that is partially explained in his latest book, The Black Veil, a so-called 'memoir with digressions.'" Again, the observation strikes me as correct. The problem here was in assuming that what most readers think of as the subject of a story has any role in a Moody project beyond giving his tangled prose something to wrap itself around, the way a vine will wrap itself around the nearest thing to hand, be it trellis, tree, or trash.

Yet another false start: "The Black Veil is the worst of Rick Moody's very bad books." Here the first mistake was in focusing on the books themselves, which bear the same relationship to Moody's career as his subjects do to his prose: the former come across as little more than a prop for the latter, incidental, interchangeable. Moreover, Garden State, Moody's first book—despite his citing "the proposition put forth by a vocal minority: that Garden State is my best novel"—is, in fact, even worse than The Black Veil; and "The Black Veil is the second worst of Rick Moody's very bad books" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Stop reading here if you are looking for a calm dissection of the work of Hiram Frederick Moody III. At this point, the use of the diminutive "Rick" is about the only wise decision that I am willing to give him credit for. The plain truth is that I have stared at pages and pages of Moody's prose and they remain as meaningless to me as the Korean characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant. Actually, the comparison is not particularly apt, because I know that the Korean writing means something, but I am not convinced that Moody's books are about anything at all. In fact, it is only when I consider The Black Veil stripped of any pretense to content that I can ascribe it a measure of objecthood—not as the diagnostic, hermeneutical genealogy that it purports to be, but rather as the latest in what I have come to regard as a series of imitations or echoes of Moody's more talented, or at any rate more authentically individual, peers.

Läs den blodiga och underhållande fortsättningen här! Eller läs hela Hatchet Jobs - Dale Pecks enastående samling bokrecensioner från 2004, för vilken Moody-recensionen sätter tonen.

Fotnot

1) Jag vill också tillägga att jag skrivit en och annan varmt entusiastisk recension, liksom andra recensioner utspridda över hela den långa skalan mellan sågning och hyllning.

2) Jag kan faktiskt inte på rak arm komma på något exempel där jag överträtt denna gräns, men gissningsvis borde det ändå gå att hitta någon recension där jag gjort en missbedömning och gått för hårt fram; jag tar i så fall tacksamt emot exempel från läsekretsen.