When I was at Iowa, Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-running successor, did not name the acceptable categories. Instead, he shot down projects by shooting down their influences. He loathed Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme. He had a thing against J. D. Salinger that was hard to explain. To go anywhere near Melville or Nabokov was to ingest the fatal microbes of the obnoxious. Of David Foster Wallace he growled, with a wave of his hand, “He has his thing that he does.”

Conroy hated what he called “cute stuff,” unless it worked, but it tended never to work. Trying to get cute stuff to work before a sneering audience is like trying to get an erection to work before a sneering audience. Conroy’s arsenal of pejoratives was his one indulgence in lavish style. “Cockamamie,” he’d snarl. “Poppycock.” Or “bunk,” “bunkum,” “balderdash.” He could deliver these quaint execrations in tones that made H. L. Mencken sound like Regis Philbin.