CORRESPONDENCE

To the editor:

If Lee Siegel wants to dismiss me as a philistine, he’s going to have to do better than he did in his review of “A Reader’s Manifesto” (Book Review, July 29). In the Atlantic Monthly essay I wrote:

“If the new dispensation were to revive good ‘Mandarin’ writing--the prose of Woolf and Joyce--then I would be the last to complain. But what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average ‘genre’ novel.”

This is my essay in a nutshell, but Siegel omits all mention of the second sentence, the better to assert that I reject contemporary fiction because it is too difficult and does not reflect “real life”! He even quotes Joyce, Conrad, etc., and claims that I must really dislike their stuff too, though none of the excerpts given conforms to my definition of crude affectation.

Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of ineluctable visuality” is, in fact, a good example of what I miss today: complex ideas expressed in a challenging but clear fashion, as opposed to shallowness posing as profundity. Every Joyce fan can explain what “ineluctable modality” means. Ask DeLillo fans such as Mr. Siegel to explain how lying to a doorman constitutes a grave tampering with the images in the doorman’s brain--a claim made without irony in “The Names” (1982), a ploddingly realistic novel, and they respond that great literature should puzzle readers. To each his own, of course; the danger lies in confusing riddles with ideas.

B.R. Myers

Los Lunas, N.M.

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To the editor:

Seldom, if ever, have I seen a book review as wrongheaded as Sabine Reichel’s “Verbal Vixens” (Book Review, July 29). Of course the screen goddesses Reichel worships were talented and beautiful movie stars. But the characters they played and their sparkling dialogue were created by writers. If Reichel’s review accurately reflects the ideas of author Maria DiBattista, professor of English at Princeton and chair of the film studies committee, then both women display woeful ignorance and the professor’s students are ill-served.

Irwin Rosten

Los Angeles