Some tell the truth–or their version of it–through exaggeration, assigning perceived offenses Brobdingnagian proportions. Dale Peck, erstwhile enfant terrible, has a permanent place in that canon. In Christopher Frizzelle’s well-written Stranger piece, “Literature’s Biggest Asshole Shows His Soft Side,” the literary terror’s new memoir about living through the age of AIDS is compared pretty much favorably to Didion. The opening:

Dale Peck is one of those writers who’s infamous among literary types and unheard of among normal people. His book reviews 10 years ago were all anyone could talk about. They were mean and unpredictable. He called Rick Moody “the worst writer of his generation” in the New Republic, the same magazine in which he compared Ulysses to diarrhea. He was a grandstander and a flamethrower, which made him fun to read, but it was fun in the sense that a demolition derby is “fun.” You experienced the fun while distrusting anyone who would go to such lengths to make it fun. The suspense in Hatchet Jobs, Peck’s book of collected takedowns, was in watching him bring every weapon he’s ever owned to the task of “proving” good writers were bad writers. He seemed to have endless energy for that project. 

Those essays bothered people, but they didn’t bother me. (Especially because the very last essay in the book does nothing but praise Rebecca Brown.) Anyone who’s read vicious reviews by Dorothy Parker, Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, Pauline Kael, or Joan Didion would be able to see that Peck’s pieces are part of a long tradition: non-hetero-white-men ripping apart hetero-white-male work. Peck’s essays were more reckless and shameless than, say, McCarthy’s piece on J.D. Salinger, but just as elegant. Literary folks were scandalized and aghast, but literary folks love to be scandalized and aghast. (Can you believe someone wouldexaggerate in print? My word.)

In April, Dale Peck published a book that doesn’t consist of Dale Peck going around telling everyone what their problem is. Visions and Revisions is about being gay and living through the “hothouse” period of AIDS, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. It’s full of previously published chunks of journalism and memoir that have been submerged in molten time, and then hardened and cooled into Literature. It’s funny and full of sex, in addition to being sad and full of ghosts.

AIDS is the perfect subject for a born exaggerator like Peck.•