MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction
edited by Chad Harbach
First Reviewed November 2014
I no longer blush with anything approaching embarrassment when I read my older writing. It is fine. I just wish I had a better sense for editing. There is no reason this needed so many semicolons. Just rework the sentences, thirty-year-old me, so that they don’t need to have such severe breaks!
This review falls into the “I was a pissy baby” genre, where my posture of resentment for having gone to law school rather than following my desire to get an MFA (or realizing I could have just gone to NYC before grad school, and worked without the onslaught of student loans) comes across as meandering criticism of what the professional culture surrounding writing tends to be. At least I recognized and named my grouchiness by the end, though the tenor of the front 70% of the essay doesn’t foreshadow that at all. Very abrupt, past me.
I doubt I would have bothered to move this over anytime soon, but I was looking for what I was reading around the time Fantasy Life for the 3DS came out for my Favorite Games of 2025 list, and it was this. Memories of the game certainly lasted longer than memories of this book, though MFA vs NYC is still a killer title.
“Being a writer required you to make the decision, over and over and over again, to write. No one would care if you stopped doing it, even if they noticed.”
I bought MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction when it was new; before the NYPL and its 88 miles of books had a copy, I purposefully strode amongst The Strand’s still-laudable eighteen miles to procure one for myself. Owning rather than borrowing—it altered my interaction with the physical pages. My standard tactic of public library loans leads me to careful consumption; marking pages with torn scraps of junkmail rather than heavy underlining or notes in the margin. If—upon returning to the tagged pages—a cursory skim brings nothing to the surface, the notation likely wasn’t worth it in the first place and the need to force an excerpt from meaninglessness is abandoned.
I had notes for days written in MFA vs NYC. Scores of underlines, smudged ink bleeding through thin pages in a homunculus of academic rigor. And after the end of the book but before I began this review, I was already resisting the memory of the experience. Resenting it. Countless excerpts—doomed for dissection—loomed before me; writing a review had become an obstacle to releasing this albatross. It was keeping me from the books I wanted to be reading, stalling me out as I felt the palpable weight of the reviews yet to come hang heavy around my neck. My words would not be positive.
If my time at Columbia Business School showed me anything, it was that academia was one large, citation-starved ouroboros—cite me, cite you—and I hated it. When a second essay out of the first twelve in MFA mentioned Raffles the cat, I stopped cold:
I looked at Emily, who was still working on her novel, the completion of which might or might not get us out of our financial rut.…I looked at our cat, Raffles, whose recent illnesses had drained the last of our resources.
My notes in the margin, heavy with contempt, read: “This is the point! the interconnected, incestuous nature of academia; this is what is infesting MFA culture. writing. you cite me. I cite you. and on and on. publish, perish—nothing else.” Raffles had me ruffled.
A mere sixty pages prior, another essayist clearly inhabited the same world of sick-cat Ruffles and writerly woes:
I was a young woman so of course they had lumped me in with the cake-girl books. But my book was not cakey. I had no idea how to explain this to people. I clearly still don’t. Knowing how obnoxious it would sound, but feeling I had to say it anyway, if only to have said it, I told them that they had to “go all out.” “Say that I’m the voice of my generation,” I told them. They looked at me like I’d emitted a long, loud, smelly fart. And so—swear to god—I amended what I’d said: “Okay, say I’m a voice of my generation.”
Her writing was fun, casual, though her name didn’t register. Nor, until I consulted the table of contents, did I recognize that her name was Emily. As in Emily-who-was-still-working-on-her-novel Emily. She had also spent some time talking about Raffles. If the name weren’t so adorable—if it were “Rex” or “Kit” or something equally banal—I doubt I would have noticed. But I did:
That afternoon Raffles pooped outside his litter box, then dragged his butt across the bathroom and living room, smearing poop everywhere. The vet had warned me that the cancer was affecting his intestines, but this was the first evidence I’d seen.
So I decided MFA vs. NYC was everything wrong with writing: the closed cultishness of a craftsman’s guild; the ostracism and elitism of an academic enclave; the faux-populism of idle, luxury entertainment.
Maybe the issue I took with MFA could be more simple than that; one didn't need to manufacture a shadowy cabal of the elite, laughing as we—the reading public—eagerly lapped up the hubristic detritus of their patrician parables. There was already enough trite juxtaposition and cynical self-help-section cashgrab baked into the title to raise one's hackles—successful writers writing to non-successful writers because that is the audience that would swallow it:
Fucking MFA programs. The students were arrogant because they had been accepted by this fancy program. They were also desperate to believe they had done the right thing—that being there would help them, change them, save them in some way.
Apply the same pathos to the hardship writers of NYC’s East Village—desperate to justify their thousand-dollar-a-month bedroom sublet—and you get the same outcome. MFA vs NYC; paean to a life well wasted.
But all my grousing fell away as the sheer volume of excerpts and quotations piled up. As I reviewed them, thinking of how to review the book, I recognized that different voices surged and different perspectives clashed; nothing was stable, nothing pushed an agenda. What I had latched onto—from the Raffles incident—was preconceived; I brought it to the book, rather than pulling it from its pages:
At the time I consider Sigmund Freud and Francois Rabelais my favorite novelists. At the time I understood that they were not novelists. Later I understand that I was being annoying.
I was being annoying; applauding myself as outflanking the false dichotomy of writers being NYC or MFA, I went into the book already thinking I was above it. MFA vs NYC is the collective—and diverse—voice from dozens of people who write for a living. They are not preaching—they are not telling anything other than their stories—so they cannot, by definition, be wrong. They cannot be “outflanked.” They can only be. They can only tell. They can only write.