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Authors: Douglas Kennedy
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it before it could blow up into something terrible and honest. He left that afternoon with the manuscript. Months passed. We continued to have our three afternoons a week. As the late-January publication date approached, David finally did start communicating his nervousness about the novel’s possible reception.
‘Well, one thing you must know already,’ I said, ‘is that high modernism has always divided people. So you will undoubtedly get wildly divisive reactions to it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.’
As it turned out, my worst-case scenario came true. Because it was David Henry’s first novel after such a long period of silence – and because Pentameter Press was such a respected publisher – it received an extensive amount of critical attention. And with one or two exceptions, he was slaughtered. The Atlantic was the first review out – and their critic (who was a self-confessed David admirer) pronounced himself baffled as to why he had ‘ slammed the door on his talent as a hip comic novelist with such shrewd compassion ’ to write such ‘ nonsensical contortions ’. The New Yorker limited its appraisal to a paragraph on its ‘New and Noteworthy’ page: ‘A campus novelist decides he’s going to out-Finnegan Joyce – on a Canadian highway no less! The result is a novel that reads like a parody of the French nouveau roman . . . though it’s dubious whether any French nouveau roman had so many references to pudenda and maple-glazed doughnuts . . . which, we think, is something of a fictional first . . .’
But it was the New York Times which really trashed him. Their critic – I won’t even mention her name, I am still so enraged by her thoroughgoing vindictiveness – wasn’t simply content to damn the novel for its obvious flaws. Instead she had to use it as a platform to trawl through David’s two previous novels and proclaim that his once-touted brilliance was merely a ‘shabby veneer which allowed him to con a willing public into believing that he was the pumped pectoral polymath of every Radcliffe girl’s dreams . . . whereas close scrutiny of his limited and limiting oeuvre show him to be a second-rate intellect who, in true American huckster style, has conned his way into the upper echelons of the academy . . . and now has the arrogance to think that he can play anti-narrative games and not get found out. If this absurd enterprise of a novel demonstrates anything, it’s that David Henry deserves to be finally found out.’
There are moments when the cruelty of others is simply breathtaking. I read the review in a little café on Brattle Street. As I worked my way through it, I found it difficult to fathom its all-out sadism. All right, David had written a bad book. But to totally decimate his reputation; to call him a fraud in all departments . . .
After putting the review down, I broke one of the long-standing rules I had with David – showing up at his office any time but the arranged hour for our weekly advisory meeting on my thesis. When I got there, the door was closed and there was a notice taped to the door in his own scrawly handwriting:
I Will be Unavailable Today.
He was due to come by my apartment that afternoon. It was the first time he missed a rendezvous – and he left no message on my answering machine. I couldn’t ring him at home, but I did leave a very neutral, correct message for him on his office voicemail: ‘Professor, it’s Jane Howard. I need to speak with you about a scheduling problem this week. If you could please call me . . .’ I got no reply.
Two, three days went by. His office remained shuttered, the note – I Will be Unavailable Today – still undisturbed on his door. I was growing increasingly worried and frantic, especially as another hammer-blow had landed on David in the days after the Times review. A writer with New York working for their ‘Intelligencer’ sector, their upscale gossip pages, had been
‘Well, one thing you must know already,’ I said, ‘is that high modernism has always divided people. So you will undoubtedly get wildly divisive reactions to it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.’
As it turned out, my worst-case scenario came true. Because it was David Henry’s first novel after such a long period of silence – and because Pentameter Press was such a respected publisher – it received an extensive amount of critical attention. And with one or two exceptions, he was slaughtered. The Atlantic was the first review out – and their critic (who was a self-confessed David admirer) pronounced himself baffled as to why he had ‘ slammed the door on his talent as a hip comic novelist with such shrewd compassion ’ to write such ‘ nonsensical contortions ’. The New Yorker limited its appraisal to a paragraph on its ‘New and Noteworthy’ page: ‘A campus novelist decides he’s going to out-Finnegan Joyce – on a Canadian highway no less! The result is a novel that reads like a parody of the French nouveau roman . . . though it’s dubious whether any French nouveau roman had so many references to pudenda and maple-glazed doughnuts . . . which, we think, is something of a fictional first . . .’
But it was the New York Times which really trashed him. Their critic – I won’t even mention her name, I am still so enraged by her thoroughgoing vindictiveness – wasn’t simply content to damn the novel for its obvious flaws. Instead she had to use it as a platform to trawl through David’s two previous novels and proclaim that his once-touted brilliance was merely a ‘shabby veneer which allowed him to con a willing public into believing that he was the pumped pectoral polymath of every Radcliffe girl’s dreams . . . whereas close scrutiny of his limited and limiting oeuvre show him to be a second-rate intellect who, in true American huckster style, has conned his way into the upper echelons of the academy . . . and now has the arrogance to think that he can play anti-narrative games and not get found out. If this absurd enterprise of a novel demonstrates anything, it’s that David Henry deserves to be finally found out.’
There are moments when the cruelty of others is simply breathtaking. I read the review in a little café on Brattle Street. As I worked my way through it, I found it difficult to fathom its all-out sadism. All right, David had written a bad book. But to totally decimate his reputation; to call him a fraud in all departments . . .
After putting the review down, I broke one of the long-standing rules I had with David – showing up at his office any time but the arranged hour for our weekly advisory meeting on my thesis. When I got there, the door was closed and there was a notice taped to the door in his own scrawly handwriting:
I Will be Unavailable Today.
He was due to come by my apartment that afternoon. It was the first time he missed a rendezvous – and he left no message on my answering machine. I couldn’t ring him at home, but I did leave a very neutral, correct message for him on his office voicemail: ‘Professor, it’s Jane Howard. I need to speak with you about a scheduling problem this week. If you could please call me . . .’ I got no reply.
Two, three days went by. His office remained shuttered, the note – I Will be Unavailable Today – still undisturbed on his door. I was growing increasingly worried and frantic, especially as another hammer-blow had landed on David in the days after the Times review. A writer with New York working for their ‘Intelligencer’ sector, their upscale gossip pages, had been
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