Hatchet Job of the Day: DIRT

Alfred Hickling in the Guardian thought David Vann’s writing in DIRT needed a good tidy:

At times one can be reasonably confident that Galen’s moods are intended to have comic intent: “He lay on his bed, thinking that this was perhaps the prophet he was meant to be, the prophet who would free everyone from religion and send them back to bed for more sex.” Yet his karmic musings on samsara – the Buddhist concept of “continuous flow” – become an excuse for some extremely loose and self-indulgent writing. There’s a lax infiltration of unnecessary adverbs (“Galen’s mind was just empty”; “It just seemed hopeless”) and some bizarrely redundant phrases: “He lifted the lid of the piano, a large flat polished piece of wood on a hinge.” We’re even told at one point that Galen “used his opposable thumbs” to grip an axe, as if to clear up any ambiguity over whether the protagonist possesses hooves.

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