Here's a little literary criticism of pg's writing that I left as a comment on that blog post. Still awaiting moderation so I thought I'd share:
Anyway, you’ve probably noticed with close reading that Graham’s essays are almost entirely declarative. He tells, almost never shows.
With Paul Graham, everything is a statement, even the questions are really statements in disguise. He may talk about meandering, but really he doesn’t meander at all. His writing dictates, it doesn’t explore. And when he accuses thesis-driven essays of “blustering through” and “hand-waving”, it’s rather funny, isn’t it?
That’s exactly what Paul Graham does, all the time.
With all those statements, he doesn’t leave any room in his essays for the reader.
Added “bonus”: As a narrator, he never changes or grows, which makes it exceedingly boring for the reader unless they have a feeling of personal vindication over what he’s stating. (E.g., the reason you didn’t like school was because you are smart. As a hacker, you are god’s gift to the earth, etc.)
It’s like going to your boring grandfather’s house and being lectured to.
(Fun fact: so is listening to Paul Graham speak live. He reads an essay. I’m not kidding.)
Meanwhile changing and growing is the raison d’être of fiction, as you described yourself when you compared his essay to Sonny’s Blues.
Honestly, I’m not surprised that your students don’t like it [1]. Maybe one of the reasons they ask “Who is this guy?” is because that essay doesn’t even bother to establish sympathy or credibility. No “I was once a confused blah blah and learned the hard way blah blah.” No “Gee, isn’t it aggravating when adults tell you what to do with your life? Wellllll…”
He presumes that the reader will hang on every word for no other reason than that the writer is Paul Graham.
> As a narrator, he never changes or grows, which makes it exceedingly boring for the reader unless they have a feeling of personal vindication over what he’s stating.
...
> Maybe one of the reasons they ask “Who is this guy?” is because that essay doesn’t even bother to establish sympathy or credibility. No “I was once a confused blah blah and learned the hard way blah blah.”
The real problem people have with pg's essays is that he just says, as literally as possible, what he has to say. He doesn't pussyfoot around it or grease it in social lubricant. A lot of people seem to need that, but literal-minded people, the type who usually become programmers, just get frustrated and confused by all that grease.
Still, in that essay he openly admits to many of his own past mistakes, and refers to learning most of it from personal experience:
"I wish I'd grasped that in high school."
"I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school."
"If I had to go through high school again..."
"That's what I did, and it was a mistake."
"In retrospect this was stupid."
"When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers."
Saying "I changed and grew" is not the same as the narrator changing and growing. You just agreed with everything I said: "he just says what he has to say."
That is engaging and persuasive for almost no one.
Moreover, him saying "I changed" comes late in the essay. It's too late to establish either credibility or sympathy.
No wonder the high school kids reject some random adult with boring, bald statement sentences telling them how they're all wrong.
> That is engaging and persuasive for almost no one.
It's engaging and persuasive for those of us who just want to grasp the underlying ideas. Maybe not so much for people who need all the rhetorical grease I was talking about earlier.
Anyway, you’ve probably noticed with close reading that Graham’s essays are almost entirely declarative. He tells, almost never shows.
With Paul Graham, everything is a statement, even the questions are really statements in disguise. He may talk about meandering, but really he doesn’t meander at all. His writing dictates, it doesn’t explore. And when he accuses thesis-driven essays of “blustering through” and “hand-waving”, it’s rather funny, isn’t it?
That’s exactly what Paul Graham does, all the time.
With all those statements, he doesn’t leave any room in his essays for the reader.
Added “bonus”: As a narrator, he never changes or grows, which makes it exceedingly boring for the reader unless they have a feeling of personal vindication over what he’s stating. (E.g., the reason you didn’t like school was because you are smart. As a hacker, you are god’s gift to the earth, etc.)
It’s like going to your boring grandfather’s house and being lectured to.
(Fun fact: so is listening to Paul Graham speak live. He reads an essay. I’m not kidding.)
Meanwhile changing and growing is the raison d’être of fiction, as you described yourself when you compared his essay to Sonny’s Blues.
Honestly, I’m not surprised that your students don’t like it [1]. Maybe one of the reasons they ask “Who is this guy?” is because that essay doesn’t even bother to establish sympathy or credibility. No “I was once a confused blah blah and learned the hard way blah blah.” No “Gee, isn’t it aggravating when adults tell you what to do with your life? Wellllll…”
He presumes that the reader will hang on every word for no other reason than that the writer is Paul Graham.
[1] it referring to the essay What You'll Wish You'd Known: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html