What do you know: Jonathan Safran Foer pops up again, this time as the poster boy for anti-M.F.A. types in this article by Taylor Antrim in the Village Voice (“Young, Gifted, and Workshopped,” May 7, 2002). The idea is that M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) writing programs are churning out cookie-cutter “workshop” authors:
Heidi Pitlor, an editor at Houghton Mifflin who deals almost exclusively with manuscripts from new writers, complained about the influence of the M.F.A., telling me that “too many new writers arrive with a whole head full of notions. I think the whole workshop scene definitely affects things.” She’s impatient with “overly crafted, heavy-handed writing, without a natural feel,” she says. In assessing manuscripts, she and other editors “will always say, This feels ‘workshoppy.’ ” And in The New York Times Book Review recently, reviewer Sam Sifton blasted Marc Nesbitt’s first collection, Gigantic, as a “collection of M.F.A. thumb suckers.”
(I tell myself I can duck this criticism because I’m a graduate of an M.A. (Master of Arts) program, which has less workshopping and more critical coursework. Also, I went to a small program at the University of Calgary, and I was one of two students doing a Creative Writing thesis in fiction in my year. Plus my advisor encouraged her students to totally ignore the publishing side of writing while we were studying. Have I protested enough?)
Antrim seems to pinpoint an overabundance of structure as the downfall of M.F.A. fiction, which I find interesting, since structure was definitely not emphasized when I was a student.
It’s hard to fault clear, organized narrative. Yet the Paola love plot feels familiar — and familiarity is the seed of genre. “If it’s inorganic, if it has a pre-existing life,” says NYU’s Wachtel, “then that’s the definition of genre.” . . .
Still, of the first books I’ve examined here, Foer’s is the least classifiable, the least familiar, the least mapped. Where Nair, Almond, and Correa’s first books feel accomplished, Everything Is Illuminated feels inventive. It is uneven for sure, but unusual and hard to categorize. It sticks in your head, and makes you wonder what the author will try next.
Note to self: make next book more inventive, less accomplished. Piece of cake.
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