Questioning orthodoxy …

… What went wrong? | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  to focus on Myers —the “unknown,” the “previously unpublished critic,” the jerk—is to skirt the central thesis. That is: abetted by well-placed reviewers, an idiom has taken hold of contemporary fiction, one of repetitious phrases, slack descriptions, strained metaphors, and pretentious, vapid thoughts. To prove it, Myers selects five celebrities of Serious Literature—Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson—and meticulously analyzes their language.

Well, I have written unflatteringly of two of these writers — McCarthy and Guterson — and I started to review one of DeLillo's novels, but found it uninteresting.