Top Ten Overrated Contemporary Writers

Below the Belt Blows on Prima Donnas, Pedos, and Posers, some of whom I knew

Today I watched a video on the ten most overrated rock singers—perhaps not the most serious one I’ve ever watched, but fun, so I’ll try the same for writers. Bear in mind that I’m although I’m ‘trash talking’ here, it’s somewhat tongue in cheek. Not all of them are bad writers, in fact some are at least sporadically good, but I think they all deserve less attention and kudos than they get. By ‘contemporary’ I don’t necessarily mean alive, but at least working in my lifetime. I’m going to withhold the name of the most overrated one of all, so you can guess. Please do! And let me know whom I’ve left out who should have been on the list. Feel free to disagree, of course.

In ascending order:

Ten: David Foster Wallace. Admittedly a bright chap, and some of his essays and short fiction are pretty fair. But Infinite Jest? Give me a break. This is Finnegan’s Wake level pretension, and equally devoid of plot or meaning. Anyone who claims to have read it is probably lying. And the bloke was pretty revolting—an abuser.

Nine: Maya Angelou. Parts of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are not bad. Parts. The ‘poetry’ is embarrassing high-school level stuff. Read at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, because she also grew up in southern Arkansas, and—well, you know what else. Just read that atrocious poem. I haven’t met her, but knew a professor at another Arkansas university who invited her there as an artist-in-residence, and she had a list of requirements in her contract of rock-star preciousness. Apparently if she smelt fish at any time on campus, even for a moment, the visit would terminate at once and she would owe the state-funded university none of the $35,000 fee (I believe) they paid her. And this was someone who made her reputation talking about social justice.

Eight: Michael Chabon: I have met him, and liked him. A personable chap. Quite talented too, a ‘wordsmith’ as the journos like to call them. Never had a rejection, apparently. Wonder Boys is fun. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ditto. But how much substance is there in his books? Very little. All right, none. When he came to our university, he gave a long talk about ‘entertainment’, which he seemed to think was very important. Certainly it is important: if you stop entertaining, your reader stops reading. But is that all there is to it? Only if you’re writing commercial fiction.

Seven: …which reminds me of another famous and glamorous writer I’ve met, Dave Eggers. Again, not talentless. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a brilliant title, but—dare I say it—the book fails to live up to it. He’s basically a journalist. The one he did about Zeitoun, the hero of Hurricane Katrina, falsely accused of terrorism, has an odd coda: years later he was charged with plotting to have his wife murdered, which he was cleared of, but he was found guilty of stalking her and sent to prison. I knew Eggers too. He’s charismatic, the students loved him, and I liked him too. It seemed mutual. He published one of my stories in McSweeney’s, despite the opposition of the fiction editor, and wrote on the dedication page of my copy of his book, ‘Know that I am your true friend.’ However, when I wrote asking for a blurb for my first book, I got a terse reply from his wife, Vendela Vida, saying that too many people wrote to him. An over-protective spouse? or just not a true friend? I still don’t know.

Six: Michael Cunningham. Yet another writer I met, as he was an artist-in-residence at my university, and I was responsible for introducing him and ferrying him between his hotel and the campus. When I went to pick him up, at the time arranged, not only was he not ready, but he was not nearly ready, and showed complete indifference when I pointed out that we would have to hurry to get to the reading on time. Instead, dressed in a wife-beater, he insisted on smoking a cigarette. We got there at least ten or fifteen minutes late. He barely spoke for twenty minutes, seemed bored by student questions, and generally made it clear that he was only there for the money. And let’s face it, apart from The Hours, which is fair rather than brilliant, he hasn’t done much. There’s a superb New Yorker Story, whose title I’ve forgotten. Oh, and he met Meryl Streep, on the film set of The Hours. That was the high point of his life, apparently.

Five: Sharon Olds. Good Lord, I have met a lot of over-rated writers, now I think of it. Another artist-in-residence. Leaving aside her tedious misandrist poetry for a moment—she said that the great majority of it is still rejected by magazines, and deserves to be, so she’s honest, I must admit—she was extraordinarily unfriendly, to the point of not honouring her contract. Our artist-in-residence contracts always stipulated that writers would give a reading, give a craft talk (each of an hour) and have dinner with a select group of faculty and students. When I invited her to dinner, she informed me that she never socialised with faculty at residencies. I pointed out that it was in her contract, and she told me that she didn’t read the contracts: that was her agent’s job, and she blamed her. Not a very pleasant person, though you could have guessed that.

Four: Cormac McCarthy. We all know he was a bit of a pedo by now, but apart from that, I fail to see the titanic genius of contemporary letters. The novels are gratuitously violent, and written in a quasi-Biblical style that is portentous, pretentious, and to me, plain irritating. They have also spawned some dismal films. No Country for Old Men must be one of the most predictable, tedious stories about a psychopath ever. Apart from a fascination with gore, I can’t see anything in it.

Three: JK Rowling. I know this will ruffle some feathers. She’s a decent writer, sure, amusing and imaginative, but a lightweight. Stephen King said he liked her because he felt that her readers would become his readers when they grew up. Sadly, as Harold Bloom commented, that was all too true. I respect her as a person (and I didn’t meet her, although we were both English teachers in Portugal at the same time), and concede that she’s entertaining enough. But in my view, she doesn’t belong in the canon of children’s literature with other British greats like Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, CS Lewis, AA Milne and JRR Tolkien. Sorry!

Two: Jonathan Franzen. Another tedious writer of the MFA type—technically unexceptionable, but with little to say except that America is an awful place, where most people are hypocrites and leave meaningless lives. Consecrated by Obama, who apparently reads and loves everything on the top lists of NPR and the New York Times.

One: the most over-rated writer of recent times is a Nobel-Prize winner known for her novels about racial oppression and injustice. Some of them aren’t bad—just not the classics they’re made out to be. I also found her posturing annoying. Despite writing about social justice, like Angelou she behaved like a prima donna, and in her later years was usually photographed wearing pearls, and in at least one case, if my memory serves me well, a tiara, in what seemed a conscious imitation of Queen Elizabeth II. (Did she, like that other ‘queen’, Beyoncé, actually come to believe what her adoring fans and critics told her?) Can you guess who I mean? Sure you can! Do you agree?

And who would you add to this list? Or subtract from it? I could add many more names! In the comments on hit pieces like this, people will sometimes ask who the writer is to criticise these august figures. And certainly the Comandante can’t claim to be nearly as famous as any of the above. However, before you trash him—which you have every right to do—remember that you must read him first! And bear in mind that this was meant to be light-hearted rather than vindictive. A piss-take, to use the venerable English term. Most of these writers have written some good stuff. And where I have criticised them for their behaviour, you may object that most writers are arseholes (or assholes, in transatlantic terminology.) Myself included, perhaps. The tradition goes back millennia. You can’t expect us to be clever and nice.

But I must add one bonus: another fallen idol, Neil Gaiman. Another bloke I’ve met, by the way, and yet another male who behaves badly, according to the scandals. A pretty ropey writer too. When he came to UCA, many of the young women in the audience—and he was so popular, he gave his talk in our theatre, which seated over a thousand—were screaming like teenyboppers. Why, oh why? Wasn’t another middle-aged Englishman nearby equally attractive, equally charming, and more talented?