A bad boy turns warm and cuddly

New York —  IF there is a modern-day equivalent of the Hollywood blacklist in the New York literary world, novelist Dale Peck believes he is at the top of it. After publishing a series of long and fiercely critical book reviews, mostly in the New Republic magazine, he became one of the most reviled critics on the literary scene, a brawler in a culture that has steadily grown more corporate and polite.

Peck has no use for sacred cows. He has attacked literary-world insiders such as Rick Moody, whom Peck famously called “the worst writer of his generation”; he has ridiculed politically correct “genre fiction” aimed at blacks and gays.

After Terry McMillan’s publishers referred to the “breathless” style of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” Peck called it “the most lazily written book I’ve ever read,” adding, “It is, in fact, very hard to believe that any part of Stella was actually written. I imagine McMillan dictating it into a micro cassette recorder while doing her daily two miles on her personal treadmill (hence the breathless comment).”

Now, after all the intemperate words, the angry critic is repositioning himself as, of all things, a young adult author. After announcing last year that he is through writing negative reviews, he has a newly published novel called “Drift House,” the fantasy tale of three children who leave New York City after the 9/11 attacks and have magical adventures at sea. It is not, as might be expected, a dark or “edgy” work; rather, Peck has written a kind of homage to the C.S. Lewis “Narnia” books he loved as a child.

The manuscript was sent out under a pseudonym by Peck’s agent, Richard Abate of International Creative Management. Knowing that he had become persona non grata in publishing suites across Manhattan, Peck was braced for rejection, he said. But just the opposite occurred; publishers embraced the book, and it was bought by Bloomsbury USA. The children’s TV network Nickelodeon soon followed, buying the rights for a possible movie.

Before this turn of events, Peck had found himself at an increasingly unpleasant crossroads. While he was a hot topic at literary parties, with a notoriety unusual for someone whose novels were not bestsellers and whose reviews appeared in a magazine with 60,000 subscribers, the verbal confrontations had drifted off the page and into real life. He met with hostility when he appeared at panels or readings. Indeed, Peck may be said to have singlehandedly rekindled the tradition of the literary dust-up. Angered by a scathing critique of his novel, “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome,” author Stanley Crouch confronted the critic in a Greenwich Village bistro and slugged him in the face.

“I am the bad boy of publishing,” Peck said wryly as he reflected on this period on a recent morning, shifting restlessly in a chair at the dining room table of his small, sparsely furnished East Village walk-up. “I am the reviled book reviewer. I am the failed novelist taking vengeance out on his betters.”

So now comes a whole new set of questions: Will “Drift House” connect with young readers? Is Hollywood an answer or more trouble? And can Peck, who was once hailed as one of the most promising young writers of his generation, resume his career as a writer of adult fiction under his real name? Will a hostile book world allow him to move on?

Relishing the brouhaha

AT first glance Peck doesn’t look like much of a giant-killer. A trim, fit, balding man, he seemed younger than his 38 years as he apologized repeatedly for the roar of a construction crew tearing up the streets and sidewalks underneath his window.

“It’s New York. It’s terribly noisy,” he sighed. “What are you gonna do?”

In Peck’s case, a little extra noise has never been much of a deterrent. As the shouting match over his literary criticism became deafening, Peck seemed to enjoy, even invite, the brouhaha. The low point came in fall 2003, when he agreed to participate in a New York Times magazine profile, holding a hatchet in the photo. It was a joke, he later said, a reference to his new collection of reviews, which he had cheekily titled “Hatchet Jobs.” But the profile treated him dismissively, asking caustically, “Has he earned the rights to his lordly thumbs down?”

Yet thick as his skin may be, Peck looked visibly relieved as he told the story of “Drift House” and its path to publication. “Everybody loved it, and the novel was bought at auction in four days,” he said. His name is back on the book. The pseudonym, he said, “was the only way to get my work out there initially, because at that point my real name was mud in book circles.”

Then, just before “Drift House” hit bookstores, the Nickelodeon deal came through. He was elated that the book, rich with cinematic detail, might eventually produce an even bigger payday. For all Peck’s notoriety, he struggles financially, like many writers of midlist fiction. He crossed his fingers, he said, over the movie deal, knowing that his creative control over the project that might result would be limited. He can accept that, he said.

“I’ve never had dealings with Hollywood before,” Peck said. “And I think people are very surprised when I say, ‘I wrote the book. I’m not a filmmaker.’ ”

He also said he is keeping his expectations realistic, knowing that so many books are bought as properties and so few are turned into movies.

Asked about the new direction of his career , Peck began a quiet answer. Then, like an engine revving up, he let loose an articulate torrent of words, his thoughts outracing each other as the subject seemed to shift every 30 seconds.

A discussion of “Drift House” turned into a commentary on children and media saturation; then he accelerated into an indictment of the “rock star” syndrome in modern publishing, the glorification of brand-name authors. The story of how he came to write book criticism morphed into a meditation on the growth of America’s celebrity culture. Then he began to riff on the subject that got him into trouble in the first place: the slow, steady disappearance of quality fiction.

Peck freely admits that, in casual conversation and writing, he has deliberately used hyperbole, harsh attacks and ridicule to call attention to his efforts. He is impatient with the notion that fiction should create “feel-good” communities of like-minded people; he believes an artist’s true role is to reveal a reader’s uniqueness. Peck has blasted what he once termed the “call and response stroke job” of criticism, saying some writers have become venerated for works that are shallow, derivative and cliched.

“I’ve always felt it’s better to be heard than understood,” he said. “I’ve waved a red flag and challenged people to take sides. I invited people to make me a target.” The problem, Peck said, is that “I wanted people to think. To pay attention to what I was saying. But critics have made me the issue because that’s easier.”

These days, though, his chosen milieu is the very different world of young adult fiction, aimed at 10-, 11- and 12-year-old readers. It’s a place with its own rules and expectations -- a place that couldn’t be further from the pages of the New Republic.

“Fantasy novels are definitely the sweet spot in this market,” said David Levithan, editor of the Push young adult imprint at Scholastic Books, which also publishes the Harry Potter novels. “These books feature kids who travel to different worlds, filled with magic and fantasy.” Although he hasn’t read Peck’s book, Levithan said that “it seems to fit right into this category.” It’s a good time to try to make a mark with a fantasy book, he said, even though the Harry Potter books get a lot of the attention. “There are others too, because the YA market is more successful than ever.”

As he waits to see how “Drift House” will do, Peck is at work on a sequel. His publisher, Bloomsbury, is pushing the book as one of its top fall titles, and early reviews in publications such as the Detroit Free Press (“compelling, original and dazzling”) and Publishers Weekly (“a thrilling debut novel for young people”) have been favorable.

To be sure, Peck still has his detractors. A recent Sunday mention of “Drift House” in the Guardian Unlimited in Britain called his new work an “unreadably fogeyish tale”; it also commented that he is known for the “savagery” of his critical writings. These days, however, he worries less about critics and more about his new audience of young readers.

“When you’ve got the Internet, video games, the iPod and 752 channels, when you’ve got two Blockbusters opening every weekend, plus school, after-school sports and your friends, can 13-year-olds actually pay attention to one thing long enough to understand it?” Peck asked. “Or do they just move through the world without understanding anything?”

But he also believes there’s room for optimism: “Today’s young readers are capable of holding an enormous amount of narrative information in their heads,” he said. “Just think of the simple linearity of most children’s fiction in 1950 and compare it with the complexity that makes up the Harry Potter story. Television doesn’t purely rot children’s brains. It has also taught them to have a more sophisticated take on this world.”

A book born of trauma

ON the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Peck was exploring ideas for a new adult novel. The terror attacks traumatized him, like many New Yorkers, and he gratefully accepted a friend’s invitation to spend time in a Cape Cod house near the ocean.

The next morning, Peck’s friend said he’d had an amazing dream: The house had sailed out to sea. In that instant, the idea for “Drift House” was born. “We’re talking instant click,” Peck said.

He had no children of his own to draw on for inspiration; rather, the book was modeled on the themes of C.S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” -- the story of kids who are sent away from a hostile environment and travel into a fantasy world.

The Narnia books “were my favorite growing up, and I was an early reader,” he said. “They’re the first books I ever remember reading on my own, and I adored them. I’ve revisited them many times during the course of my life, as a child, in adolescence and then later on.”

He began sketching out the first 75 pages of a novel, which ultimately had little to do with 9/11 beyond the first sentence. The 408-page book tells a complex yarn about three precocious children who end up in a magical house that floats on the Sea of Time.

Peck said the writing came easily, but he conceded that he had never thought about producing a children’s book until that moment. The experience “was very rewarding but also a departure, considering what I’d done before,” he said in what can be called a major understatement.

Born on Long Island in 1967, Peck has said his mother died under “mysterious circumstances” when he was 3, and he was raised by his father. It proved to be a volatile, unhappy relationship that became a key theme in several of his books.

His father remarried three times, and the family moved to Kansas. There, Peck developed a love of reading and writing. He won a scholarship to Drew University in New Jersey, where he began writing his first fiction. He later attended the writing program at Columbia University and, in 1993, published his first novel, “Martin and John.”

The book, which told the tale of a gay writer named John and his doomed lover, Martin, who dies of AIDS, won Peck heady praise; New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani called him “one of the most eloquent voices of his generation.”

But he resisted being categorized as a “gay writer” and took on other, more expansive themes in succeeding books. In a review of his 1998 novel “Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye,” about two New Yorkers who move to a small Kansas town, Kakutani called him a “fiercely gifted modernist”; the book made the Los Angeles Times’ list of the year’s best fiction.

Peck’s career took a major turn when several publications asked him to write reviews in the 1990s. His first foray, an overview of recent “gay fiction,” sparked angry responses. He wrote that gay literature had to be judged like any other fiction and could not thrive with stereotypical, one-dimensional characters.

“I think everybody was quite shocked when a gay writer whose career had just been launched by the successful emergence of gay fiction then said, ‘Hey, folks, gay fiction has already reached a dead end,’ ” he said. “I was just trying to tell the truth.”

Peck was off to the races -- and he didn’t care whom he offended.

Philip Roth has written some brilliant novels, the critic said, but there is a disturbing theme of misogyny in “American Pastoral” and other works. Peck ridiculed a literary culture that showered praise on David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” speculating that few of the critics who gave the lengthy book enthusiastic blurbs had actually read it.

All along, Peck has refused to offer any solutions for the problems he sees eating away at modern fiction. But he does have some theories. The root of the problem, he suggested, goes back to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” “To this day I find it unreadable,” he said. “When I was 22, I said it was like he takes a shovel and puts it into a dictionary and throws a bunch of words on the page. You know what? That’s actually not art. And it’s not hard to do.”

For now, as he keeps his focus on “Drift House,” Peck hopes only to sail into less troubled waters.

“People who shop at Barnes & Noble voted ‘Ulysses’ the best novel of the last century, and who’s to tell them different?” he wrote in the introduction to “Hatchet Jobs.” “There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that’s just because I’m a bitch.”