I don’t know what is worse—authors who demonstrate their seriousness by writing novels of absurdity and despair, (but always selling them), or reviewers breathlessly reviewing them and praising the authors for their courage.

It’s the worst of nihilism and boring to boot.

Here is my short letter of criticism of the latest entry into this genre—both the novel and the review. It won’t be published, by New York Review, so I share it here.

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To the editor:

     I just read Nathaniel Rich’s breathless encomium to Joy Williams’s novel of nihilism, Harrow, (“Exhilarating Antihumanism,” NYR December 16) in which only ugly absurdity abounds. The world is ugly. We are ugly. And nothing can be done. It’s insanity to believe otherwise. Rich cannot think of another American novelist “brave enough to structure a novel around this theme.”

     What’s so brave about it? This is a culture that has lost faith in anything. It, or at least a certain segment of the culture, thrills, like Rich at such a transgressive message. Williams gives permission to lord it over all those people who still think something might have meaning. The novel’s antihuman all right, but more like antihuman pornography, since it doesn’t even have the courage to toss a bomb.

   You want to see brave? How about writing a novel in which Christ returns to Earth in time to save us? Or, if that’s too religious, how about a novel in which a corporate titan—the richest man in the world—is so moved by his daughter’s love of polar bears that he gives up all his wealth in an attempt to save the polar habitat? Try getting a novel like that reviewed in the pages of the New York Review. It takes undeniable skill to do what Williams has done, but not courage.

     Since Williams is not actually living out of her vision, but selling a novel about it for money, a better word than “brave” to describe her would be bourgeois.

     In fact, a perfect lampoon of Williams would be the Nihilism Theme Park, in which a person–$100 for an individual, $150 for a family—could actually attend the boarding school in Harrow, and eat “powdered eggs and toast.” Another ride would be “the train without a destination.” The grounds of the theme park would be a mix of parking lots with broken asphalt and muddy lakes with water without oxygen. Rich would really be thrilled.

     Corporate America would be happy to profit from such feigned despair. It sure beats having to head off attempts to improve things.