At the publication party for Black Messiah, I met Jack Remick,
a bus driver, who reviewed Screed, and said it was 30 years
ahead of its time. He wrote,
What makes Screed such a dangerous book is that it rolls back the cover of a reality to establish once and for all a new way of looking at narrative. Saunders simply and effortlessly calls into question everything you think you know about novel writing and narrative structure.
Screed is a danger to future generations of writers. It will be responsible for the death of everything that comes after it. It disembowels your urge to imitate and it throttles you; it tears writing up into small pieces and gives you in return one of the great experiences a writer can find--it turns you into a reader. It does what all good writers [and citizens] dread finding--coming across something totally new, completely fresh, something outlandish and wonderful, something that is not art but is becoming art. Something in the end that tells you everything you've been doing is crap.
It is going to take more than one person to lift it and to find out what it really has to say. Like all important writing, it is packed and will need to be talked at infinitely before it will reveal itself. But, it exists principally in the mind and the memory, not in the art of its present. This is flat. This is why critics will not see it. It is something so new, it does not fit. It is probably the first piece of American fiction that is not a novel. Like all diamonds, it was born rough.
I could agree with that. But I didn’t expect anybody else
to see it. If they did, I thought it would be a bus driver,
rather than a literary critic.