enough, and you're bound to hit the nail on the head sometime—or so Auster seems to think." David Guterson Myers critiques David Guterson's novel Snow Falling on Cedars mainly for its "sluggishness" of words and "echoic" thought process. Myers concludes that Snow Falling on Cedars is no more than "flat, stereotypical descriptions" of characters in a given context, and, were its pace not slow, it would be considered a genre novel. Myers criticizes Guterson's average descriptions of predictable characters that have often been explored in literature and complains that Guterson brings nothing new to the characters or story. Other critiques and recommendations In addition to these critiques, Myers also criticizes Thomas Wolfe, Jay McInerney, and Rick Moody. As examples of books with a style preferred by Myers, he lists, among others, To the Lighthouse, Those Barren Leaves, The Adventures of Augie March, The Victim, The Man Without Qualities, Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues, La Comédie humaine, The Orchard Keeper (by previously criticized author Cormac McCarthy), Moby-Dick, Malone Dies, and Gormenghast. Rebuttals to previous criticism Myers devotes a section of the book-length text to describing the response the shorter version published in the Atlantic Monthly received upon its publication. This portion of the book is an analysis of the criticisms of his original critique, and while it is written with Myers' characteristic "humor", it is the place in the book where he most aggressively defends his views. Myers' critics call him a philistine and an advocate for low-brow literature, and suggest that his criteria for good literature implicitly define it as writing that is simple enough to require little effort to read. Myers responds that books may also be difficult to read because of poor writing style, and he recommends other authors as examples of a complex style executed with skill. Several critics claim the authors Myers featured were already discounted by the literary establishment. Myers was unable to find any evidence backing this claim, and responds to this argument with the absence of criticism for the authors and several examples of praise. Critics suggest that the ambiguity Myers criticizes contains the value of the works: "consoling riddles", as one critic calls them. Myers rebuts, "Literature need not answer every question it raises, but questions themselves should be clear." "Difficult lucidity," in Myers' opinion, is what is missing from contemporary prose—the kind of writing that, as he says, "rewards the use