Tag Archives: James Wood

Memorial Day Links

May 25, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Mark Sarvas appeared in Seattle, as announced, and… no one showed up except yours truly. Way to go. The good news, however, is that the Seattle Times interviewed him. Alas, the interview leads with a reference to a hatchet job in the New York Times, which I won’t deign to link to here. A snippet of the interview:

Q: I worry that the kind of reading, that trancelike state you achieve when you get deep into a book, is going away in favor of a different kind of reading on the Internet. And what do you think is going to happen with book reviews? Will they eventually migrate to the Net, and how will that affect them?

A: There are different kinds of reading. The kind you do on a couch with a book is different from what you do with your blog.

I share your troubled view of the future — but I think it has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet. This is not just about book reviews; it’s about classical music, architecture, movie reviews.

It’s not a crisis in book reviewing; it’s the fact that we live in an age that I find distressingly incurious — interested in material pursuits, unreflective, narcissistic, shallow. An age when the thing that’s on everyone’s mind is … “Did you see ‘American Idol’ last night?”

It’s nothing to do with the Internet or the loss of newspapers. It’s a much wider critical moment, one that I leave to the cultural anthropologists to figure out.

* James Wood further illuminates what he values and what he doesn’t in fiction while simultaneously (and justifiably!) criticizing bloggers for their too-frequent rush to judgment. If you leave this blog to read it and don’t come back because you’ve spent too much time meditating on what he’s said, I won’t blame you. I’ve got a response rumbling in me, but it’s not ready for publication.

(Hat tip TEV.)

* From Anecdotal Evidence, more preaching to the choir. Granted, I agree with the post, but I’m guessing that the people who should most read it won’t, much like the protests at the NBCC and elsewhere regarding the cutbacks in book reviewing, or those endless damning reports about how we don’t, as a society, read much.

(Hat tip Books, Inq.)

* This video isn’t book-related, but watch it anyway.

Life: Flight edition

May 13, 2008 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed. From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun. They shone out like smelters’ puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over. As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height. And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.”

—Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

(Notice James Wood’s remark in How Fiction Works: “Bellow had a habit of writing repeatedly about flying partly, I guess, because it was the great obvious advantage he had over his dead competitors, those writers who had never seen the world from above the clouds: Melville, Tolstoy, Proust.”)

Life

March 27, 2008 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.”

—Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

(This is one of the uncommon novels speaking from the first person plural point of view—”us,” “our,” and “we”—like Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Whether this technique is annoying or enchanting I’ve yet to decide. James Wood writes in How Fiction Works: “I can tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed.”)

Life: Wood on Woolf

November 21, 2007 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , ,

“[… Woolf’s] essays and reviews are a writer’s criticism, written in the language of art, which is the language of metaphor.”

—James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

The Book Against God

November 17, 2007 By in Books Tags: , , , ,

The Book Against God starts with a great sentence—”I denied my father three times, twice before he died, once afterwards”—and a great first chapter that tells enough to intrigue without launching an information barrage. From there it’s a long downhill to the end, with too many strained passages, like one that goes, “Three drawers of the desk were sticking out, panting to spit their contents onto the floor. The only surfaces unmolested by anarchy were the books on the man bookshelves, whose clean rounded spines were as ordered as organ pipes.” Panting? I’ve never seen a drawer pant, and someone who is panting is breathing hard, not spitting, and even then, someone panting would be too tired to hock a really nice one. I’m willing to let surfaces be molested by an abstract idea like anarchy, but not right after panting drawers. Yes, I want original writing, but not at the expense of truth.

Those two quoted sentences are also symptomatic of a novel that veers too close to an essay; Wood’s grand The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief is just an essay collection, and better for it. Not having to attempt making people allows those ideas to flow much more easily.

Despite misgivings about the sometimes awkward language and weak characters, I respect all the raw skill demonstrated in The Book Against God and hope Wood tries again. A few times I laughed, like this section on the page after the panting one: “For instance, [his father] wrote book reviews for a journal of theology in London, which sent him advance copies of the books. He had removed a sticker from one of these and glued it to the favourite of his six different bibles. It read: ‘This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof.'” Lovely. If only more descriptions like those came together to make characters.

It’s unusual for me to read a first novel I dislike and still want a second. If I do see another Wood novel you’ll read about it in this space, and with luck he’ll have funneled his aforementioned skill in the right direction.