The Irresponsible Self; review.
bookburn
By James Wood
(quote)
Posted on Sun, Jun. 27, 2004
Critic's literary cause justifies his caustic style
NEW REPUBLIC'S WOOD DISDAINS AUTHORS WHO CONFUSE CHARACTERS,
CARICATURES
By Charles Matthews
Mercury News
As a book critic for the Guardian in England and for the New Republic
in the United States, James Wood has developed a reputation as both
withering and thoughtful. It's easy to overemphasize the withering
side of Wood: He's known for having said harsh things about such
literary demigods as Toni Morrison and John Updike. In this new
collection of essays and reviews he damns Salman Rushdie's ``Fury'' as
``a novel that exhausts negative superlatives'' and denounces Tom
Wolfe's ``shallowness,'' ``bumptious simplicity'' and ``cinematic
vulgarity.''
But unlike some other unsparing critics, Wood never seems intoxicated
with his own venom. You can almost always see him trying to figure out
where the writer went wrong. Writing about books that he regards as
seriously flawed but still impressive, such as Zadie Smith's ``White
Teeth'' and Jonathan Franzen's ``The Corrections,'' he observes: ``The
big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to
have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish
stillness, as if ashamed of silence. . . . Indeed, vitality is
storytelling, as far as these books are concerned.''
The success of such busily inventive writers as Thomas Pynchon, Don
DeLillo and David Foster Wallace has inspired younger novelists, such
as Smith and Franzen, into a frenzy of cleverness: ``The contemporary
novel has such a desire to be clever about so many elements of life
that it sometimes resembles a man who takes so many classes that he
has no time to read: auditing abolishes composure.''
Wood has a label for such novels: ``hysterical realism.'' And he finds
the roots of it in Dickens, ``whose glittering liveliness is simply
easier to copy, easier to figure out, than the recessed and deferred
complexities of, say, Henry James's character-making.'' Dickens was a
master of caricature, whose work ``shows that a large part of
characterization is the management of caricature.''
Like a lot of us, Wood tends to gauge the worth of writers by
measuring the distance between them and Shakespeare, whose characters,
he says, ``feel real to us in part because they feel real to
themselves.'' For Wood, character is king, and writers who let their
egos get between themselves and their characters -- like the
``hysterical realists'' -- tend not to measure up.
Wolfe is one of those who would set up Dickens, rather than
Shakespeare, as a model for the contemporary novel. Wood quotes from
Wolfe's manifesto calling for reporting-based realism in fiction: ``No
one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of
heroes and heroines in . . . Shakespeare.'' To which I sputtered: But
. . . but . . . Lear? . . . Cordelia? . . . Desdemona? Wood simply
takes that ``remarkable sentence'' of Wolfe's with icy calm, remarking
that ``it is an orphaned realism that not only excludes but actually
sets itself against Shakespearean character.''
But Wood also acknowledges that Dickens had something that his
latter-day disciples lack. (Wood admits that in his own first novel,
``The Book Against God,'' published last year, his ``characters owe
more than a little to the hard edges of Dickensian caricature.'')
Unlike so many of the Dickensian figures in today's novels, Dickens'
caricatures -- Wood's example is Micawber -- often arouse a genuine
empathy in the reader; they make us feel for and with them, which
rarely happens, Wood says, in contemporary fiction: ``It has become
customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours within a fictional
world without experiencing anything really affecting or beautiful.
Which is why one never wants to reread a book like `The Ground Beneath
Her Feet,' while `Madame Bovary' is faded by our re-pressings.''
It's something of a jolt to encounter a critic under the age of 40 --
Wood was born in 1965 -- who hopes to find in literature something
``affecting or beautiful,'' words so fogeyish they make him sound like
Matthew Arnold. But his willingness to be unfashionable is what makes
Wood so valuable.
This collection of pieces written for the New Republic, the New
Yorker, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement
is a treat not so much for the smart snarkiness of his attacks as for
the penetrating insight of his appreciations. Unlike some critics,
Wood actually seems to like to read!
``The Irresponsible Self'' is full of appreciations, not just of
writers whom almost everyone appreciates -- Shakespeare, Tolstoy,
Dostoevski and Saul Bellow -- but also of less-familiar ones --
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Joseph Roth, Bohumil
Hrabal, J.F. Powers. Wood's enthusiasm for these writers is
infectious: His essays made me want to go read each one of them.
THE IRRESPONSIBLE SELF: On Laughter and the Novel
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 312 pp., $24
(unquote)
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