Letters to the Editor
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The man who ruined petty contrarian obits.
In order for Stephen Marche to justify gleefully pissing on the corpse of a little known writer, he must persuade us Robbe-Grillet actually had influence over the world of letters.
He fails. Marche barely defines Robbe-Grillet's ideas, names only one of his works and quotes just six words of his writing.
Marche also delights in pointing out Robbe-Grillet's lack of success and visibility, which undermines the idea the author had some effect on novels.
The real point is another midlist author whining about The State of The Novel, which he deems bad probably because he isn't as famous as Nabokov.
Like one of Nabokov's characters, Marche decides to blame this dubious claim on a dead Frenchman with increasingly absurd reasoning: "It is entirely appropriate that six months before Robbe-Grillet died, James Wood became the principal literary critic at the New Yorker."
Why, um, sure Steve. Also, Atonement was made into a movie just a year before Robbe-Grillet died. Get it? Get it?
I guess there's a subculture of grad students who resented having to read Robbe-Grillet. If so, just admit this grudge, this rambling attempt to make the petty significant just makes Stephen Marche seem like a vengeful twerp.