McSweeney’s Quarterly, brainchild of best-selling memoirist Dave Eggers, was instantly hailed as a revolution in publishing. It was only distributed through independent book stores. The editors made a point of reading, and sometimes publishing, work from the slush pile. For those who found the magazine itself pretentious, there was the McSweeney’s-related charity 826 Valencia, an after-school program that helps children with their reading and writing. And most of all, there was the groovy indy packaging, typically styled ‘design genius’.
The indy tag, at least, suits. Begun on the advance for Eggers’ now-famous memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, McSweeney’s has always been run on a shoestring, mainly by Eggers himself. There is no staff to speak of, and the quality of its contents derives from the intelligence and connections of its few core workers. By connections, furthermore, one must understand not only the contributions of the notorious McSweeney’s clique (derisively abbreviated FoEs, or ‘Friends of Eggers’ by hostile websites) but a larger literary community who respect the publication and are willing to contribute to it for no remuneration. It is a business, in short, which has built its success on reputation alone. That in itself seems — and really is — a heroic achievement in the money-driven, market-tested US media world. And while the tone of the publication offends some tastes, no one can honestly object to the quality of the work, which is consistently sharp with a characteristic air of brilliance enjoying itself, a bewitching cheerfulness and even sweetness. The air can stray, however, into self-congratulation — this is what chiefly offends — and the cheerfulness can often cloak mere empty- headedness.
The tone is casual — at times, stridently casual. In McSweeney’s, not taking oneself too seriously often becomes a kind of narcissistic posturing. A discourse on political culture may be broken by asides about the author’s dog, disclaimers about his/her inability to punctuate, wisecracks to a (usually famous) friend, and the word ‘um’. It is partly a populist American tic, the same ‘just folks’ manner employed by Republican politicians to reassure the public they ain’t too darn smart. And it is partly staged carelessness, the stance of a gifted schoolchild who prides himself on not having to study.
An associated feature is McSweeney’s inclusiveness, an embracing of pop forms framed as the welcoming attitude of a generous spirit. Of course it is nothing new for elites to explore the culture of the masses for inspiration. And certainly it is part of the McSweeney’s brief to wed what is seen as the gutsy vitality of popular forms — glossy magazines, comics, pulp fiction — to high art production values. There is a sense of reaching over the heads of the New York intellectuals (derisively abbreviated by Eggers as NYIs) to the purer responsiveness of the people. But pop does not proceed from the people, of course, at all, but is a corporate product like McDonald’s or Kool-Aid. This is not to deny that inventiveness and even insight can spring from corporate employees. But what the McSweeney’s crowd are mining when they turn to pop culture are the products of their classmates and neighbours, alumni of the same universities from the same elite suburbs.
A standard hype nugget about McSweeney’s praises it as a social phenomenon that gets people excited about reading again. Never mind that its readership is a subset of the readership of the New Yorker, and has been reading all along (one cannot vouch for their excitement). In America, the college-educated public are content to be viewed as underachieving schoolchildren who must be offered treats to crack a book. That New York intelligentsia disdained by Eggers, who 20 years ago were discussing Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, now discuss J-Lo’s amours. They flock to superhero movies and watch Fox ‘ironically’. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the Iliad of our time. Today, everything, even thought, must come processed with sugar. McSweeney’s is just a fresh (exciting) expression of this rule. The sugar is in the marketing — that indy vibe — which makes McSweeney’s less a reading experience than a shopping experience.
The prejudices of the shopper culture unfortunately inform — and limit — the ambitions of McSweeney’s. The American middle classes are themselves money-driven, market-tested — to a degree, they are in fact corporate products. More than in any other industrialised nation, they live their lives segregated from their less moneyed compatriots. Insulated from even the spectacle of want, they are stunningly — sometimes engagingly — innocent. At their worst, they have the aspect of an overfed cat: declawed and neutered, safe for the furniture. Their conversation centres on restaurants, real estate, shoes — purchases. It is also a relentlessly positive culture. The shoes one is wearing are always great, the meals are great, the area is great — as if conversation itself had become a guerilla advertising technique. All negativity is censored, all deviance excluded. Those who drink, fuck, complain too much are referred for psychiatric help.
An apposite e-mail dialogue between Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem was recently posted on the McSweeney’s website, entitled ‘Complaining About Complaining’. In it, Eggers laments the culture of picking holes in the successful, citing Bob Dylan, among others, as a victim of a mentality which cannot wholeheartedly celebrate the achievements of the gifted without scorning their less wonderful productions. He talks about The Sneer of the NYIs, the attitude of superiority that refuses to just enjoy. Lethem demurs mildly but essentially supports Eggers’ thesis. Both agree that one should simply celebrate the fact that there are books without small-mindedly picking apart those one dislikes, especially in public or, worst of all, in print. There is no mention anywhere of the fact that either man might have been the target of such criticism and thus personally interested in seeing it silenced. It also fails to address the fact that literature itself largely consists of complaining, often sneering, of the most ill-spirited kind. To free literature from vitriol, one must start with erasing Stendhal, Fielding, Swift, and certainly carefully edit Virginia Woolf, praised but misspelled by Eggers twice in the course of the dialogue. And it furthermore overlooks the possibility of grounds for complaint. The unspoken assumption is that worthy people are those who have no grounds for complaint.
This points to the underlying, niggling truth that the delightful cheerfulness of McSweeney’s comes from an Everyman so entrenched in privilege that ideals of politics and art are really mere sources of enjoyment — luxury goods. In this world, young people become writers and artists to express their ‘creativity’. Activism is a career path. Even the poor implicitly exist to provide volunteering opportunities for under-challenged Ivy League youth. The poor are ‘rewarding’. Of course, the self-conscious McSweeney’s crowd would be the first to note this and send up their own do-gooding. And send up the poor, and send up the sending up of the poor. Then all this must be illustrated with clip art, coyly explained in footnotes, and sold in seventeen separate booklets, possibly with pop-up elements, a score or scratch-and-sniff turds. The proceeds go to charity, and that reassuring sweetness reminds us that do-gooders are, after all, good. The New York Times then satisfyingly responds with sniffy dismissal, characterising the enterprise as ‘sophomoric’ and mentioning ‘spanking’. The poor remain poor, and their complaints go unheard beneath the cheery laughter, applause, and voluminous press.
Sandra Newman is a New York-based writer. Her most recent novel is The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, (Chatto and Windus, 2003).
