Critic Slams Emma Cline and Hernan Diaz Openings as Boring Literary Fiction

In a Substack essay, writer Devon Halliday critiques the opening pages of two forthcoming literary novels, Emma Cline's 'Switzy' (Random House, Sept 8) and Hernan Diaz's 'Ply' (Riverhead, Sept 29), arguing they exemplify a trend of boring, overly descriptive literary fiction. Halliday, who has not written fiction in five months, says her frustration with contemporary literary fiction stems from books that are 'bad' in the sense that she can't imagine why anyone would give them more than five minutes. She subjects the first pages to the same scrutiny she would apply to a querying writer's sample, noting that the first page is the most edited and meant to hook the reader. For 'Switzy', longlisted for the Booker Prize, Halliday criticizes Cline's unnecessary descriptions, such as 'the flat, sad month' and 'chaos that resolved itself into order', which she says sacrifice story for literary-sounding language. She also points to the promotional letter claiming 'not a false note' as false. For 'Ply', by Pulitzer Prize winner Diaz, Halliday highlights verb tense inconsistencies, mixed metaphors, and meaningless sentences like 'the breeze... was a reflection of the river'. She argues that these high-profile writers are 'phoning it in' and stalling for time, and calls for critics to engage with novels more scrupulously and for writers to make novels fun again. The essay ends with a call to action for literary sentences that are true to life and matter to the story.