"[3] The New York Review of Books called Martin and John "surprisingly sophisticated", but said Now It's Time to Say Goodbye "collapsed under the weight of its overladen allegorical structures" and diagnosed Peck's fiction as a "seesaw between a strained 'lyricism' ... and cliché.

His most notorious line, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," set the tone for a collection of essays published under the title Hatchet Jobs.

In 1996, Peck reviewed the David Foster Wallace best-selling novel Infinite Jest, writing that "[w]hat makes the book's success even more noteworthy is that it is, in a word, terrible.

Peck, in the same article, also attacked American writers Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, characterizing the latter as "a very clever guy" and his prose as "tentacular – I might almost say ...

Peck's reviews, in turn, were met with criticism, with the editors of Brooklyn-based n+1 magazine, though stating, in 2004, thatwhen The New Republic took a writer down—as it notoriously did with Toni Morrison, Judith Butler, Frank Bidart, Don DeLillo, Elaine Scarry, Colson Whitehead, Kurt Andersen, Sharon Olds, Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Barbara Kingsolver...[it] was the best literary section in the country[6] also writing:With the emergence of the ridiculous Dale Peck, the method of Wieseltier's literary salon reached its reductio ad absurdum.

Thus The New Republic's supposed brief for dry, austere, high-literary value—manifesting itself for years in a baffled rage against everything new or confusing—led to Peck's auto-therapeutic wetness (as self-pity is the refuge of bullies) and hatred of classic modernism (which, to philistines, will always be new and confusing).

[6]In May 2011, Peck's criticism of Jewish American literature in which he claimed "[I]f I have to read another book about the Holocaust, I'll kill a Jew myself" prompted a public outcry.