Snark.

I saw the title of David Denby’s new polemic, Snark, and I simply had to have it. Whether it was pro-snark or anti-snark, it didn’t matter. As it turns out, it’s anti-snark, and it’s awful – the whine of a man who, I’m guessing, has been the target of snark and doesn’t like it.

Snark‘s biggest problem is that it’s not clear on its subject: Denby struggles to define snark, and redefines it on the fly as the situation suits him. Denby gives examples of what he considers snark, but he is using “snark” as a catchall term to identify and sequester anything he doesn’t like. It seems to me that snark, to Denby, means any content or commentary that insults its target or adversary; any content or commentary that is maybe kind of unfriendly or might hurt someone’s feelings; any content or commentary that slanders or libels its target; and any content or commentary that criticizes Barack Obama. Insults and calumny are their own categories, and they likely have no defenders; a book that says “slander is bad” is somewhat tautological in nature, as no one is running around saying that it’s good, and slander is bad as much as water is wet and David Denby is confused about snark. Unfriendly content is snark, in Denby’s world, when he decides that it’s snark; he makes a point of excusing several snarky pundits whose snarktacular ways are an essential part of their popular appeal, such as Steven Colbert.

I have no objection to Denby taking the opportunity to praise the best satirists and ironists out there, but his inability to pin down snark – and the ways he takes pains to say that he recognizes the benefit of some forms of what can only be called ridicule – frustrates the entire work. It’s best encapsulated in the schizophrenic chapter on Maureen Dowd, the vitriolic and popular Washington-based writer for the New York Times. I’m no fan of Dowd’s, but Denby’s complaint – in short, that she can be cutting in ways that don’t necessarily inform the reader – is weak, and once again, he seems to be most up in arms when she’s attacking Democratic candidates, particularly Obama.

The book is short and is unbalanced in its approach to dissecting snark or whatever it is that Denby is dissecting. An early “fit” (what Denby calls his chapters – I suppose that’s supposed to be cute, but it came off as pretentious) describes the history of snark, with a long tangent on Juvenal, perhaps the progenitor of snark or at least one of its earliest practitioners. He deserved a mention, not a long digression with samples of his work (which, by the way, sounded a lot more like crude insult than snark). Similarly, the passage on the origin of the word “snark” – from Lewis Carroll’s epic poem “The Hunting of the Snark” – doesn’t have much bearing on the current meaning of the term. I think Denby’s real motivation for spending so much time on the poem is that he likes saying “Boojum.”

I’m not the only one who thought Snark to be a waste of a few hours; it received a strongly negative review from the Times, and I found this point-by-point review of Snark that viewed the book as validation for the snarkers.

Next up: I’m a little backlogged on writeups – I just finished Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and have started Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.