about relative success

You're saved if your father takes no interest in you. You're ruined if you wish he had.

In The New Yorker piece, "“Death of a Salesman”: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Mediocrity", staff writer/blogger Giles Harvey says Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" isn't so hot. True, Miller is no Shakespeare, but rather than defend either Miller or Harvey, I'll just point out one thing in his critique.

Harvey opens with a story about criticism he received as a creative writing student:

I once had a creative-writing teacher who would tactfully condemn a line of student verse by saying, in the long-suffering yet indulgent tone with which a wife might scold her husband for once again forgetting to put the cat out, “It sounds like poetry.” ...

What our teacher was complaining about, it now seems obvious, was the tendency of students to cloak our rather banal thoughts and impressions in a poetical gauze—our tendency, after reading Keats, say, to fill our poems with bowers and nightingales and long, slow vowels.

Then begins Harvey's critique, which argues that the conflicts and issues in Miller's classic are not conveyed with enough subtlety, that "In “Salesman” there is always a straight line leading from a harrowing past event to a present neurosis or failure." Moreover, "Characters are explained, exposed, insisted upon; but Miller rarely allows them to stray into the kind of tantalizing opacity and incoherence that makes the people in, say, Chekhov or Shakespeare seem so real." In other words, Miller failed to cloak his banal thoughts in a poetical gaze.

Note:

• My criticizing the author's apparent inconsistency might not be spot-on, but his criticism misses (or ignores) some big targets, too.
• Harvey had just seen Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman.