james wood

Did anyone read How Fiction Works? Got a mild kicking in the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/books/review/Kirn-t.html

I disliked that review; Kirn sounds defensive. I mean -- "(Wood) flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic"? This is like Karl Rove discussing John Kerry.

I read a third of HFW at the bookstore last month; his defense of the beauty of free indirect style was educational. Lots of it seems cobbled together from what he's written already about Chekhov and Flaubert, though.

I haven't actually read any of his criticism. I only came across the Kirn review while looking for Foster Wallace stuff, but the review somehow makes me want to read the book, which was presumably not Kirn's intent.

I'm printing out a bunch of other reviews to read on the way to work this week. Everyone seems to have something to say about it.

Although I am not buying in hardback.

lol u can have my copy. the stuff on character was good but i wasn't that pleased with it overall. i do really like his criticism tho.

Is joke?

If not, thanks! If it's worth dropping in the mail to the UK from where you are then I'll happily cover postage.

no joek i have no idea what shipping would be tho!? i also have to find it but yeah, sure i'll look when i get home

i read and liked it. i learned a lot from it--even though i didn't really agree with everything he said, he made me think a lot. he seems to favor a certain kind of third person narrator over the first, and i really prefer first. . . but his passion and smarts won me over.

Kirn's essay was totally mean spirited and shitty.

I'm guessing it's not going to be cheap, but if it's less than $10 I'm down.

Thanking you!

it's not less than http://ircalc.usps.gov/IntlMailServices.aspx?Country=10142&M=2&P=3&O=0&sd=10

ugh this stupid formatting. "less than $10"

ok, well thanks for checking that out. I will maybe read a few chapters in the library.

has a really excellent article in this week's newyorker about richard yates wherein he manages to use the word bovarysme, critique mad men and force me to completely rethink my feelings about r. yates.

oh sorry link: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/12/15/081215crbo_books_wood?currentPage=1

anything that gets more people to read revolutionary road is okay with me.

the piece didn't really tell me anything new though. or make me rethink anything. but that's cool.

Just an hour ago I finished How Fiction Works. The man's erudition and conviction is so damn infectious.

He didn't say much that was new about Yates, but I was relieved that he loves it too.

yeah i don't always agree with the guy but he's such an excellent writer and a sharp thinker

He got me to read Joseph Roth a few months ago: worth it, I suppose.

Who says MIT graduates don't know about the Liberal Arts?

sorry.

what?

i wanna read a Wood book. i am all for good modern lit crit. though part of me just wishes that louis menand would write all the crit in the new yorker. including the music and movie reviews.

he was talking about james woods

Wood is much the better stylist and intellect, Scott. Menand is...I dunno, the avatar of The New Yorker's accumulated wisdom.

menand is great but i think i like woods better. but tbh as long as they keep updike from writing criticism i dont really care.

i didnt really like yates when i read him, certainly i hadnt thought of Revolutionary Road as "essentially, a novel all about artifice". that was a new and really interesting line for me and the couple of paragraphs where he talks about how the book succeeds in escaping the pat judgmental truisms of suburban unhappiness made me think about how id read the book, about how limited i might have been in my reading. i was impressed that he could make a claim so persuasively for both yates and the book being "more radical than ever".

here's a respectful dissent on woods from the nation

i'm not erudite enough to judge that essay, but woods prose does feel bloodless sometimes. i probably like menand better, he seems more plugged-in to the world-at-large. that richard yates piece was good, though.

I like Menand better too, but they do different things. Wood's great at, well 'how fiction works' (I haven't read it yet, but I want it just for the cover)--the mechanics of sentences, a writer's style, the internal logic of a text. Menand is in my favorite lineage of critics, those who believe (pace Matthiessen) that:

Aesthetic criticism, if carried far enough, inevitably becomes social criticism, since the act of perception extends through the work of art to its milieu.

but has Menand got an ethos, in the sense that Matthiessen, Trilling, Wilson, etc did? His serviceable prose and agreeableness suggests he takes things as they come.

reading his critique of the gaseous George Steiner, I sometimes feel like I am watching two men beat each other with balloons.

I should read some of Wood's crit. I did really enjoy 'The Book Against God', although it was no masterpiece.

I know the cover is supposed to appeal to people just like me, but man does it ever:

http://www.avclub.com/content/files/images/How-Fiction-Works.article.jpg

I like James Wood quite a lot, but I don't think I like that cover.

What don't you like, pinefox? The colors? The type? The way Works is italicized?

You better Work.

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/0082377

Colson Whitehead, gosh. He has a fourth novel coming out? I'd forgotten he had a third.

sometimes u try so hard and still its not enough

Have yet to read one of his novels but lolled at the first part of that "james root" essay.

Magnificent critique, till the penultimate paragraph:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081208/deresiewicz/single

Oops, OK, M. Coleman already linked to it.

The antepenultimate paragraph was cherce, though.

I don't know the word 'cherce', but looking again at the passionate para you mention, it's amazingly fierce! That piece really blends high praise and low condemnation in a curious way, which I've perhaps only seen in Terry Eagleton's reviews (start by saying how great someone is, then by 3/4 through they're on the floor).

The last paragraph has its moments of overstatement, though. If the US can no longer produce Trillings, Kazins, and Howes -- the cultural moment has passed -- then why blame Wood for failing to represent a movement that no longer exists?

Just spent a while reading Deresiewicz's reviews on the archive and, yes, there is a curious grouping of praise and damnations with an interesting sense of timing to the switch.

Really like the piece on Kundera.

I was saying to the Pinefox elsewhere how JW's failed conceit seems obviously indebted to, but equally obviously inferior to, Woolf's Mrs Brown.

well, the bizarre thing is that the conceit isn't even present enough to fail. He literally begins each programme by saying 'remember that I talked about LUCY GRIEVE' - then completely forgets her imaginary existence for the next 15 minutes and talks about how Shakespeare is great!

It's like if Woolf had written an essay on Bennett / Brown and forgotten to tell us in the essay who these names referred to.

I'll hear out for the Lucy Grieve tonight.

Absolutely priceless.

11:00. 'We've been assuming that our fictional character, LUCY GRIEVE, has a coherent self - with her own rich thoughts, memories and feelings. But is the self really as coherent as this?'

Followed by 15 minutes about Muriel Spark and Jane Austen.

I swear, Lucy Grieve is like ... she's like Robbie Keane on the Tottenham bench, so criminally underused she's basically not there. She has appeared in roughly 5 sentences in the last hour of JW. She needs to get a loan agreement to a programme by Sebastian Faulks where she could actually get mentioned twice and have a run-out, maybe hold up the ball near the corner flag in the last 5 minutes.

whoever she is she sounds like a lovely girl.

that ex-boyfriend with the quiff though.

Only manage to hear one of these in the end. On Thursday's ep I didn't get why the main character on Austerlitz was still a blank page. Wood under discussed that novel.

Really liked that ep. Then again I have never had a class on literature after 16, and I guess I must have had some pre-16 but I can't remember a single thing about them.

Prefer this to Faulks on fiction (has ILB talked about this? I only managed to watch about 30 mins of one ep) as Wood has an idea or two although it isn't right to compare. My tastes are for European and Latin American novels, but still, any programme on the novel should never just concentrate on British/American novels (I wouldn't like if it was the other way round).

I missed last night's. Hope I can catch up with it and find out if Wood continues his comedy routine to the end.

"You'll remember our character, LUCY GRIEVE. We've seen her walking down a street, thinking and talking. How would the novelist represent her dying? ... Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies is a remarkable fictional account of death."

Faulks on Fiction seems pretty woeful; it makes me doubt that such a person could have written any good fiction himself. It also mainly consists of footage from TV and film adaptations.

"Another famous fictional death is that of Flaubert's Emma Bovary. You may remember that she commits suicide with drugs stolen from the chemist Homais."

"In Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Alfred Lambert dies a sad, lingering death from Alzheimer's. Franzen portrays this rather brilliantly through the eyes of his family".

This week's essay was entitled The Life Cycle of a Fictional Character, written and presented by James Wood. And in next week's Essay, Clive James reflects on being a transplanted Australian who has enjoyed many kinds of success as novelist, songwriter, presenter and public intellectual.

Now, as a late night treat for Friday, a rarely heard suite from Francesco Saverio Giai.

lol.

"If our fictional heroine LUCY GRIEVE has to die - and I am loath to let her go even in this last programme - how might we go about describing her end?"

"It sometimes seems as if Tolstoy's godlike genius impelled him to describe all the rhythms of life and death"

"When fiction acts like this, we feel that it is doing what it is supposed to do."

"Modernist fiction ... is just getting going."

"So let's begin again, this time without leaning on any old texts or old masters. LUCY GRIEVE walks down a street. How should we now proceed?"

To be honest the fact that next week = 5 nights of pure Bracewell makes my Clive James placeholder look very tame.

You can quote and recast to make it worse than it was. The bit about what fiction should do is iffy on its own but it was backed by a good bit on Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and then more on Hadji Murat.

Couple more eps to listen back but what I'm getting most out of this are his bits on Jane Austen. It is odd how reliant he is on modernism when he is actually setting these continuities from the 19th century right into 20th century. Wood is very much into showing how modern writers seemingly discover what turn out to be scientific realities through fictional enquiry.

The scientific asides are enjoyable but it can be seen in one sense as justifying Claude Simon and I don't think it needs that.

hilolrious, pinefox

hilolrious?

i really lolghed is what i am saying

"You'll remember our character, LUCY GRIEVE. We've seen her walking down a street, thinking and talking. How would the novelist represent her dying?…"

i thought you had made this one up, pinefox.

he really likes describing the relation between the reader and author as one of 'force'.

'…we are forced to inhabit a world beyond life…'

i don't believe that this dude has any great love for modernist fiction.

I thought I did make it up. But then the reality was very close to it. Oh, here it is:

"If our fictional heroine LUCY GRIEVE has to die - and I am loath to let her go even in this last programme - how might we go about describing her end?"
― the pinefox, Saturday, 26 February 2011

I like Wood quite a lot - as a reviewer, he's terrifically readable, if nothing more - but I don't ultimately think this programme showcased him terribly well. It was elementary in a sense - not to say it was so simple as to be dumb, but it was too plain to demonstrate what's good about JW, notably his brio with words (and also his tendency to attack or disdain other people, which can be entertaining at least).

In fact it's all made me reflect that you could say of JW what Eagleton once fancifully wrote of Jameson: that style for this writer is the cavalier surplus and play that he allowes to exceed his puritan sense of responsibility and plainness.

Also started thinking: who's the better critic - James Wood or Tom Ewing?

Feel like it's hard to answer because where Wood is an excellent conventional operator in lit crit/higher journalism/semi-academic tradition, a lot of Tom E's work has been finding & founding structures for criticism.

idk who would you rather read, Wood on the Pet Shop Boys or Ewing on Tolstoy?

That is a good answer.

I very much agree that Ewing has done a lot to 'found structures for criticism'; this is a large part of his importance.

Would I like to read Ewing on Tolstoy? ... up to a point, but, well, actually I don't think it would interest me that much. Partly cos I don't know Tolstoy.

I don't like the PSB at all - but I wouldn't mind reading Wood on them, cos it be Wood writing as Wood, with his own Woody 'plumage'. So maybe on that basis my answer is that Wood is the better critic - or maybe it's just that he is a better writer. (Not to say that Ewing is a bad writer himself.)

('it *would* be Wood')

i bet whatever tom wrote it wouldn't be all 'ah the rich blah blah blah of this this that, consciousness matters'.

Ewing can be relied upon to tell us how good he thinks the KLF were.

ILB FAP report: we wondered who was ILM's equivalent of James Wood (I suppose this means: someone with some cultural authority whom some respect but many disdain). It was proposed that the answer is Simon Reynolds.

it feels like a long time since reynolds has been a hot topic round here. he has a new book soon though so.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Novel-Liam-McIlvanney/dp/0571230865

wherein JW 'takes on' Atonement.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n08/james-wood/whats-next

I liked the start of this, and the attitude to nasty religious attitudes, though I think the last sentence may be more a rhetorical effect than a logical assertion.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9107386@N06/5686814908/in/photostream

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/12467824780/my-disappointment-critic

my sense of this is

a) happy enough to agree with JL's parenthesis about 'thinking about God'
b) pretty odd to dredge this up now, and not sure JL explains why he does so
c) esp as he couldn't be bothered to keep JW's postcard - puts him an odd position to accuse JW of aristocratic disdain (and even what he remembers of the card sounds quite polite!)
d) more broadly / intellectually, JL seems to me to be fighting a very old battle here - the kind of thing that was hot when Leslie Fiedler was going rogue, but that has arguably lost its point today. I think he somewhat 'strongly misreads', or whatever, JW to get him into this argument, which I am not sure is an argument worth having at this point.

It's a bit of a pity (though fun) because I have admired and enjoyed both these writers - it seems wrong that they can't find any common ground.

I like Lethem's journalism but after Motherless Brooklyn I haven't finished any of his novels.

the more I think about this essay, the odder it seems

I mean there's a whole section explicitly saying 'I don't read JW, but here's what I think of him, in a general glancing way'

yeah imagine that: a novel indignant over a bad revew

a novelist too

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/why-write-novels-at-all.html?hpw

Last year, I found myself mildly obsessed with a cache of YouTube clips, featuring the novelists Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Nathan Englander at a 2006 literary conference in Italy called Le Conversazioni. Part of what interested me, in a gate-crashing kind of way, was the backdrop: midsummer on the Isle of Capri, with flora aflame and a sky the color of Chablis. Another part, inevitably, was watching Wallace with the knowledge that he would kill himself two years later. Mostly what I kept coming back to, though, was how lighthearted, how loose — how young — these writers seemed here. It’s not that they weren’t already an accomplished quintet, with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award to their credit. But in 2006 the gravitational center of Anglo-American letters still lay back on U.S. soil with Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy and John Updike and Toni Morrison and Philip Roth — those towering figures who, according to a Times survey released earlier that year, produced the greatest American fiction of the previous quarter-century. By comparison, Le Conversazioni might as well have been “The Breakfast Club” and Capri a weirdly paradisiacal high-school library.

Five years later, in 2011, the islanders finally overran the mainland. Franzen’s “Freedom” was ubiquitous, and just when it threatened to drop off the best-seller lists, the posthumous “Pale King” by Wallace stepped up to take its place. All year long, Zadie Smith was issuing a running commentary on world letters from her post as the house critic at Harper’s, and through the fall, it was hard to tune in to NPR without running into Eugenides — or to miss his giant billboard avatar looming over Times Square.

It may seem like a journalistic contrivance to read this group’s collective ascent as evidence of an aesthetic trend. (If you don’t hear people throwing around the term “hysterical realism” anymore, it’s because any net broad enough to catch “The Virgin Suicides,” “The Corrections,” “On Beauty” and “Infinite Jest” is going to have a hard time excluding, say, DeLillo’s “Angel Esmerelda” or much of Philip Roth.) On the other hand, several of these younger writers have actively invited us to see them as standard-bearers, holding forth in essays and interviews about “today’s most engaged young fiction” and “the novel’s way forward.” Is there a sense, then, in which Le Conversazioni’s class of ’06 really does represent a bona fide school?

was ZS really issuing such a running commentary all through 2011?

well she reviewed books every month

midsummer on the Isle of Capri, with flora aflame and a sky the color of Chablis

shameful bro

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107209/reader-keep?page=0,0

is ruth franklin like, a straight up james woodite?