If you can't say something nice...

I've never read any of Rick Moody's novels, but that doesn't matter. This review is a brilliant evisceration of pretentiousness. If you like my blog, you will love this:

The New Republic Online: The Moody Blues (1 of 3) Together these books amount not so much to an oeuvre as to a career, one whose success, though fascinating, is inexplicable to me. In fact, I have to confess that I consider myself unequal to the task of analyzing Moody's writing. Its faults strike me as uniform and self-evident and none of them are complex enough for a sustained analysis. My gut feeling is that if you honestly do not believe that this is bad writing, then you are a part of the problem. When I finished The Black Veil I scrawled "Lies! Lies! All lies!" on the cover and considered my job done. Like all of Moody's books, it is pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic. His much-touted compassion strikes me as false (in his fiction he makes his characters suffer in order to solicit your pity, and this seems no less true of the self that he describes in The Black Veil); his highly praised prose--"rhythmic" and "evocative" are the tags that you see most often--comes only at the expense of precision, which is to say, of truth.