A Review of “How Fiction Works” and Just About Everything Else

I realize I’ve been remiss – here James Wood’s How Fiction Works has been out in paperback for weeks now and I haven’t posted anything to mark the occasion!  And it reminds me of my remissness on another score:  that here amid all the piss-taking I’ve never really offered a positive example of what genuine, serious literary criticism “at the present time” should be. 

Fortunately I find that I’m able to kill both those carrion at one throw and get back to the other much more important and interesting things that have been occupying me lately.  I’m reposting, in full, the splendid September 14 offering at Fafblog.  I just found out about this blog (thanks, comrade Augustine), don’t know anything about the blogger, and doubt that the post was written as any kind of direct response to Wood, but I immediately recognized how well it works as a review of How Fiction Works, and in fact of Joseph O’Neill’s Nitherland or Netherparts or whatever it was and Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and for that matter just about any work of contemporary “literary fiction” as well as pretty much all the “criticism” and reviews you’ll read in venues like New Yorker, The New Republic, Entertainment Weekly, Etcetera, Ad Nauseam …

We need less like that, and more like this: 

storytime

"Once upon a time there was a fafnir and a giblets, and their names were Fafnir and Giblets," says me. 

"Giblets can't relate to these characters," says Giblets. "Who do they come from and where are they going and what are their hopes and their dreams and their dark and buried pasts? Giblets demands backstory!" 

"And they were pirates and spacemen and industrial chemical mixers who sailed the sea and tilled the land to get the girl and win the big game and ride the road of truth and self-discovery and of course the American Dream," says me. 

"Giblets does not believe in this story," says Giblets. "Where is the dirt and the dust and the gritty grainy gunk of the everyday? Giblets demands verisimilitude!" 

"And they dragged their straw-thatched huts and their earthenware mules and remembered the sweet-smelling spices and the warm baked bread of Grandma Stolchi's industrial meat-packing plant," says me. 

"Giblets is uninspired," says Giblets. "Where is the greatness and the grandeur and the daring doing of deedly deeds? Giblets demands a sense of the epic!" 

"And the mountains crunched and the thunder groaned and the wind and the war and the singing of songs and the angry angry sea," says me. 

"Giblets is detached," says Giblets. "Where is the warmth of the heart of the fiery fires of the human experience?  Giblets demands more feeling!" 

"And though their love was deep and fierce and right and true it was doomed from the start," says me, "for she was only a lowly scullery maid, and he had been trampled to death by elephants." 

"Giblets is confused," says Giblets. "Where is this going and what does it mean and how does it contribute to the advancement of the art of American letters?  Giblets demands a theory of storytime!" 

"And they all lived happily ever after," says me, "except for the ones who were squashed or exploded or eaten by bees." 

"Tell me another one," says Giblets.

And James Wood Shall Lead Them

China Mieville on the "LitFic Praetorians":

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iii) LitFic Praetorians

Every new mess mainstream politics and culture gets us into should be its last, but never understimate its staying power.  It's an ironclad, and the burgeoning econopocalypse, despite causing a little wobble here and there, is not yet putting paid to it.  For the novel, this will be illustrated by a declaration of war by the lions of good taste against those sceptical of its claims to investigate the contours of The Human Condition (tm), or some such.

Unlike much previous soi disant Literary Fiction, the LitFic Praetorians will understand i) that they are a genre among many, ii) that their esteemed position is under attack.  And they will decide to take the fight to the enemy.

Accordingly, this movement will continue to privilege those aspects of fiction that have come, for some, to be the sine qua non of literature itself -- a celebration of 'interiority' and a particular propagandist conception of 'character'; a prose that claims to be 'spare' and 'precise'; a striving for a horizon of metaphor to perfectly express some 'human truth' in terms of a more concrete thing (crockery, paint, a particular animal, a meteorological condition, etc, preferably referred to in the book's title); a dynamic of artful recognition; and so on. However, unlike its less self-conscious predecessors, it will do so overtly, courageously taking the battle to exteriority, militancy, estrangement and alienation, and aggressively foregrounding its concerns on such seemingly unfriendly literary turf.

Thus, for example, the redemptive power of art will be affirmed in the bloody imperial rubble of Iraq; musings on the melancholy of age and the rediscovery of life-affirmation in the arms of somewhat younger women will unfold before a backdrop of polemical dream-logic; and poignant stories of family betrayal and infidelity among academics will be set during alien invasions.

Influences include all winners of the Booker prize, particularly Ian McEwan, particularly his book -- claimed by the school as its foundational text -- Saturday.

What to say: 'Great literature transcends everyday concerns.'

What not to say: '"Literary Fiction" is a marketing category.

'

**************

From Mieville's guest-blog post at Omnivoracious, "Neither a Contract nor a Promise:  Five Movements to Watch Out For," which he offers as "a few modest proposals . . . to fulfil the moment's cultural needs."

Via Kick Him, Honey

A Reader Points Me the Right Wray

First-time reader, first-time caller here; just discovered your Contra James Wood blog and really enjoy it. I've had issues with Wood ever since a particularly pompous English lecturer I had in college -- a very limited aesthete, who used to devote whole sessions to reasons why Dickens shouldn't have had the third-person narrative in Bleak House, for example, because he found it gaudy and tiresome -- held him up as THE model of fine criticism. I think your points are sound and your mission very welcome, and I hope that your blog is a bellwether of where Wood's reputation and influence is heading. (One thing I do wish you'd talk more about is what a poor stylist he is: his locutions (awkward and unnatural) and metaphors (somehow both banal and outlandish) render a lot of his readings indecipherable, bizarre given his reputation for fine points and attention to detail, and I can't think of another critic who writes this poorly in quite this vein, which is like 10th rate Stephen Dedalus or something, all elliptical riddling with little philosophical subtlety and a frankly baffling deafness to the register and feel of individual words.) 

Since I don't want Wood's defenders to have any easy targets, however, I wanted to correct what I think are a few mistaken assumptions in your most recent review of John Wray. First, Wood is actually doing a good job of 'participating in the literary culture of his time' by reviewing this book, and he may well be ahead of the pack on this novel. Wray has written two very good books that didn't command a broad audience because they suffered from a lack of narrative force / compelling story, but he won a number of awards and was tagged by better critics than Wood as a promising young writer. With this book he's finally found something that can showcase his gifts as an author while telling an engaging story, and as such his publisher (FSG) has decided to push the book: he's already done a couple of fun, stagey readings in Manhattan, and 'Lowboy' is Amazon's book of the month for March 2009. From a publicity standpoint -- if not a literary one -- the decision by the publishers to recall Trainspotting in the book design and advertisements is wise, given how much cultural attention that book got, and I think/hope Wray gets his due here: this is one of the more interesting new books I've read in the last two or three years. 

Second, you seem to take Wood at his word that 'Atmospheric Disturbances' is superior to 'Lowboy', which I think couldn't be further from the case. (Wood's notion that 'Lowboy' breaks no new ground is way off.) The fact that Wood champions 'AD' should actually be good fodder for your contention that he's 'posturing' -- trying to appear balanced and broad-minded by praising an experimental, postmodern novel. He comes off as a pretty careless posturer here, in my view, as 'AD' is a very contentional, derivative, ultimately worthless book that essentially borrows a premise from "The Echo Maker", a plot from Muñoz Molina's "En Ausencia de Blanca" and everything else from Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49". The funny thing about 'AD', given Wood's obsession with narrative accuracy, is that the gaping discrepancy between the voice of the putative narrator and the voice of the author -- it is just too obvious that a 35-year old urban female/literary careerist wrote this thing, not the middle-aged male Jewish psychiatrist who supposedly narrates it. Lots of knowing references to Borges, static literary devices, and this particularly obtrusive prose poetry (lots of silky metaphors and use of very specific colors ('cornsilk blond hair', 'a little russet dog', etc.)) that reminds me of those first-person male cowboys in Annie Proulx's work who compare sunsets to shades of mascara, then ponder precisely which mascara word is most beautifully true. I'm more flexible on credible voice in a narrative than Wood is, but even I found Galchen's clumsiness unbearable, and could hardly read the book. Anyway, for further proof that most sensible readers seemed to just not like this book, check the customer reviews at Amazon, the non-professional (read: non-compromised) reviews at Goodreads, the skeptical dismissal at the Complete Review, and the best review, by a favorite reviewer of mine, Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun. Lots of the negative reviews come from fans of Pynchon and Foster Wallace, which seems to show that people more sensitive to postmodernism than Wood think this book is a failure, making his advocacy of it particularly head-scratching. Probably has more to do with the fact that she teaches at Columbia and is 'in' with NY literateurs; shades of Wood's dedications to Bellow and Norman Rush. 

That's it from me. Keep up the good work!

Slouching Towards Irrelevance

So James Wood has returned to the pages of the New Yorker after a hiatus of almost three and a half months.  Perhaps his employer had been keeping him at a discreet distance for the duration of the official John Updike obsequies (with a little DFW grave-robbing thrown in).  Whatever the case, Wood has resurfaced at an opportune moment, coinciding with the appearance of two important literary works (one controversially so):  Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and the first volume of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence.  So what book has Wood chosen for his auspiciously-timed return? 

Lowboy, a novel by John Wray.  Or as his name is alternately spelled:  W-h-o? 

Of course I’m always willing to admit when I’ve been unduly nasty, and I’ll do so right here:  What I just wrote is unnecessarily mean to John Wray.  But I did it, like I always do (my barbs are never gratuitous), to make a point.  You would think that a reviewer of Wood’s ostensible stature would want to participate in, and try to shape, the literary culture of his or her times.  That’s what an actual critic would do, and indeed that’s what Wood himself tried to do with his misguided and incoherent diatribes against so-called “hysterical realism.”  If these had the feel of a media-manufactured “moral panic,” that’s because that is basically what they were:  Wood created a peril and then rushed to our rescue.  Wood also bravely championed W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño when everyone else in the profession was either ignoring or dismissing their works, single-handedly bringing those authors to the attention of grateful readers from a lonely perch on his bandwagon of one while his book-reviewing peers and the whole publishing industry howled in derision or turned their backs.  In light of these past heroics his current choice of Wray’s novel can only look like hesitation, or timidity.   

It’s a modest review of what Wood concludes is a modestly accomplished work.  Wray’s story of an escaped paranoid schizophrenic riding the New York subway breaks no new ground, and Wood himself acknowledges having recently reviewed a better book – Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances – that takes up similar themes.  So why review this one now – because it turned up in the in-box?  Instead of convincing us of the necessity of this particular notice, however, Wood ends up lamenting the book it might have been, and it’s here that the review takes on its most characteristically Woodish convolutions.  Commending the way that Wray subsumes his non-fiction sources in the creation of his protagonist, Wood writes: 

Yet those sources also unhelpfully remind one of the novel’s weakness, which is precisely that it is about “a paranoid schizophrenic,” explicitly flagged as such by the publisher, rather than about someone who is losing his mind, as, say, Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” and Thomas Bernhard’s “Concrete” are about people losing their minds. Books like Hamsun’s and Bernhard’s exult in the unreadable, the indecipherable.  “Lowboy” is exceptionally tender and acute, but it is at times in danger of falling into the legible stability of case history, in which the reader might check off recognizable symptoms, usefully assisted by the subject’s mother, who is on hand to provide the necessary background information, and validated by the acknowledged medical sources. John Wray is a daring young writer, highly praised for his last two novels (both historical, and both unlike each other), and yet his third novel is, for all its boldness, also a bit conventional. An early review quoted on the book’s cover likens it to Dostoyevsky, but “Lowboy” lacks the bountiful inefficiency of “Crime and Punishment” or “The Devils.” The book is less bold, less playfully demanding, than Rivka Galchen’s recent novel, “Atmospheric Disturbances,” which explores a similar mental deviancy from what Galchen wickedly calls “a consensus view of reality.”

Instead, “Lowboy” performs a strange two-step: whenever Will is at the center of the novel, the narration vigorously stretches itself; but the alternate chapters, in which Violet and Lateef give chase, squeeze the book back into conventionality. These scenes are elegantly done, and are often moving, but they seem, by comparison with Will’s experimental story, unchallengingly realist. 

Along with this passage’s mention of Hamsun, Bernhard, and Dostoevsky, Wood elsewhere makes comparisons to Kafka, Murakami, and Harold Pinter.  In such a short essay it’s a rather pressured assembling of major figures with anti-realist street cred, and it would border on non sequitur if the agenda weren’t hovering so near.  Wood’s approval of Lowboy is staged in the shadow of writers who “exult in the unreadable, the indecipherable,” and by comparison Wray’s book is taxed with being too “conventional” and “unchallengingly realist” in places, and insufficiently “experimental.”

This is posturing, and it should call to mind the disinterred 1994 Guardian list (discussed in my previous post) that Wood’s pet rocks were holding up a few weeks ago as some kind of definitive demonstration of the breadth and variety of the reviewer’s tastes (“Pynchon!  Barthelme!  DeLillo!” panted Mark Sarvas).  As I said at the time, what counts is not the citation of this or that name but the way of reading the critic or reviewer deploys, and nothing in the actual track record of Wood’s reviews shows any fundamental sympathy with the kind of fiction these authors wrote; in fact what we find is antipathy.  The same holds true for the reviewer’s current citation of Thomas Bernhard:  there just aren’t that many points of contact between the aesthetic protocols articulated in How Fiction Works and Bernhard’s annihilations of the novel.*  In Wood’s review of Atmospheric Disturbances he acknowledges Galchen’s debt to Bernhard, but ultimately reads her novel not as an “exultation” in “the unreadable” and “the indecipherable,” but as “a novel of consciousness,” i.e., yet another ratification of his cookie-cutter humanism.  Figures such as Kafka and Dostoevsky (whose The Devils is, if anything, “hysterical realism” avant la lettre) have the sanction of time; they are canonical, and Wood’s readings of canonical figures rarely challenge their status.  If it’s Pynchon he’s writing about, we learn that allegory is unacceptable in the novel; if it’s Melville, allegory is suddenly OK.  Similarly, “paranoid vision” and the novel-form are inimical when DeLillo’s Underworld is on the stand, but Dostoevsky and Kafka (no “paranoid vision” in those two, right?) enjoy an unconditional amnesty.  And when Toni Morrison is under review, magical occurrences in fiction are out of bounds and even “a moral problem,” but when Gogol does it it’s different, because he’s, er, well . . . Gogol.       

But for the moment let’s take Wood at his word, because he rarely postures without purpose.  He says he wants a more “experimental” and less “conventional” novel than the one that Wray, in parts, has produced?  Something more along the lines of, say, Knut Hamsun?  Well then, let’s turn to Wood’s 1998 essay on Hamsun, later reprinted in The Broken Estate, and see what he has to say there.  Although Hamsun’s characters "are tissues of fictionality," Wood asserts, “they are not tediously weightless, or unreal, in the way that we know from the nouveau roman or other avant-gardisms.  They would never say, ‘I am fictional, I was created by Knut Hamsun’.”  In this deeply philistine remark whole swathes of unconventional, “experimental” literature are dismissed with a truculently populist wave of a hand.  Not only dismissed, but misrepresented:  That particular type of “I’m-the-fictional-creation-of-author-X” narratorial self-consciousness is hardly representative of the work of the main exemplars of the nouveau roman, of Sarraute, Simon, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor.  To me it sounds more like a strain of U.S. metafiction from the sixties and seventies (although even then an unfair caricature), but I suppose that’s close enough for the intellectually perspicacious Wood.  For what he is really relying on in this typically sloppy amalgam is not his readers’ knowledge (“as we know…”) but their ignorance and their prejudices (Nouveau roman? Avant-garde? Just who do those snotty French think they are, anyway?).  Most importantly:  Is this the sort of statement that inspires trust in a critic’s pronouncements on “experimental” and “unconventional” writing, or on writers who “exult in the unreadable, the indecipherable”?

Wood goes on to situate Hamsun as an innovator in character and narration, but he defines that innovation in deeply conservative and traditional terms.  Hamsun, he writes, is “virtually the inventor of a certain kind of modern fictionality,” and also “the great refiner of the stream of consciousness, that mode of writing that is in some ways the culmination of novelistic realism, of the novel’s traditional devotion to human beings, that represents the soul’s stutter.  His heroes are souls, not fictive figments.”  The novel’s traditional devotion to human beings – that reeks of ideology and polemic, especially when followed by the pious insistence that human beings are “souls.”  And so we have traveled in a kind of loop:  Wray’s novel Lowboy needs to be less “unchallengingly realist” and more “experimental,” like the novels of Hamsun; Hamsun’s novels are radical and experimental because they extend traditional realism and affirm the human "soul."  This is typical Wood:  When “experimentalism” is acknowledged at all, it is immediately assimilated back into the traditional, doused in treacle about "the soul's stutter."  Wood’s main device is thus the obverse of the Russian Formalists’ defamiliarization – it is refamiliarization.**

The existence of the Wray review in the context of the other works available for reviewing – Littell’s The Kindly Ones and Beckett’s letters – functions as a test case for Wood’s professed desire for more “experimental” and less “conventional” fare.  Instead of issuing such protestations in a weak-tea review of a weak-tea book, Wood could simply have chosen to review one of these other, and certainly more challenging, volumes (to say nothing of the stream of interesting, vital fiction being issued by publishers such as Dalkey Archive Press).  The objection that Wood was laboring under editorial constraints is weak; certainly he did not trade up from the New Republic in order to be told what to review, and – unless he is on his way out again – he could certainly have expressed a preference with every expectation of its being accommodated.  But instead we have the New Yorker contemptuously dismissing The Kindly Ones in an unsigned "Briefly Noted" capsule review and the Beckett correspondence covered, dully and dutifully, by movie-reviewer Anthony Lane ("compelling," he calls it).  Of course there will be other Wood reviews in the coming weeks and months, and no doubt some of them will be on important or challenging or even “experimental” books.  And then we will see to what extent his way of reading them departs from “the consensus view of reality.”

__________________

*  This is a rather different thing than the question of whether or not the reviewer subjectively “enjoyed” Bernhard’s Concrete or Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or whatever.  What counts are the aesthetic and critical protocols that are brought to bear in the essay or review, even in criticism that is as close at times to the merely affective as James Wood’s.    

**  I'm not denying, I want to underscore, Hamsun's status as an innovator.  The point is that Wood invariably casts such innovations in tendentiously backwards-looking terms.  An early post of mine shows how he does this, for example, with a passage from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist.

Magic Beans

Fellow critics of Wood!  Hail – and farewell.  Our day was short.  We fought the good fight, but Wood's supporters bested us on the field of valor.  Or valour, even.     

The charge was led by Mark Sarvas at The Elegant Variation, with his recent post “James Wood’s Best Books Since 1945.”  The best books list was originally published in the Guardian in 1994 as a response to Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon.  When it comes to explaining the list’s criteria of selection, however, Sarvas wisely steps back and lets the wordsmith speak for himself:  Wood introduces his list by saying that he has tried to “avoid the ‘representative’, ‘important’ or ‘influential’ and [has] chosen, instead, books which I like, which seemed to me deep and beautiful, which aerate the soul and abrase the conscience . . .” 

Ah— the soul!  That has the ring of Wood, doesn’t it?  To “aerate the soul and abrase the conscience!”  What fineness!  I just have to let that roll around in my brain for a while:  to “aerate the soul and abrase the conscience.”  Yes, yes, I can feel it – it’s definitely abrasing something in there . . .    

Sarvas goes on to tell us that, besides the intrinsic fascination of the list itself, he has posted it for another reason as well:

I'm offering it as a corrective of its own to some of the foolishness that has cropped up around Wood of late.  He certainly doesn't need me to defend him but this list should give the lie to the popular cliche [I think Savras means “cliché”] of Wood as the hidebound dean of realism who thinks fiction stopped with Flaubert.  The list appears in its entirety after the jump, typed up exactly as it ran (with its idiosyncrasies), but I think you'll find some surprises.  Pynchon!   Barthelme!  DeLillo!  And quite a few others.  

This deft – even definitive – sally against Wood’s critics was quickly taken up by other blogging Woodies, an instant meme.  Daniel Pritchard at The Wooden Spoon lowered the volume on the gloating but communicated the same basic message:      

Over at The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas has posted the entirety of James Wood's list of Best-Written Books Since World War II. The surprises, at least I think they'll be surprises, for his many web-based detractors include: William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch; Toni Morrison, Sula & Beloved; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 & V; and Don DeLillo, White Noise.

“All this fuss about the man when all he wants is for us to talk about the books!” Dan adds in mournful appreciation of the essentially modest, reclusive personality that effaces itself in each of Wood’s unsigned reviews. 

Next to pass the meme along was journalist Alex Massie in his blog at The Spectator (Massie has also written for The New Republic and National Review Online): 

What's notable is not so much the list itself as the extent to which it contradicts the view that Wood takes a particularly docrtinaire [sic.] view of fiction. True, he may be most famous for his critique of "hysterical-realism" but there's more to him than that and, as the list makes clear, there are some novelists after Flaubert and James that he likes. Wood's detractors  - of whom there are many - might be surprised to find Pynchon, Vonnegut, Rushdie et al on the list. For that matter, I'm surprised to see The Satanic Verses make the cut...

Finally, belatedly, but inevitably, Nigel Beale joined the fray.  His post reproduced the entire list from The Elegant Variation and, rather than restate the meme in slightly different words, he economically quoted Sarvas’s original “Take that, evildoers!” statement of intent.  Beale does, however, introduce a twist, adding that the list “also undermines an extremely distasteful insinuation of racism put forward recently over at foolishness central:  Contra James Wood.” 

Isn’t “distasteful” kind of an odd word to use in this context?  But I keep forgetting, “taste” is what it’s all about.  Unfortunately Beale doesn’t tell us how the list is supposed to accomplish this undermining – could he be referring to the handful of writers of color in the roll-call of over ninety authors?  In that case the proportions are roughly the same as those in the list at the end of How Fiction Works, another ninety or so novels that include three by authors of color.  Wood himself says it best:  “I have used only the books I actually own – the books at hand in my study – to produce this little volume.”

No, the list proves one thing and one thing only, that James Wood knows how to put discrete items into a sequence.

As Stalin once pointed out, paper will take anything that is written on it, yet our four bloggers advance the list itself, its sheer facticity, as an open-and-shut demonstration, a definitive proof.  Where is the argument?  If there is one, it is of the type which usually appears in freshman composition textbooks under the heading of the Logical Fallacies.  It’s an “argument from authority,” i.e., something is true because someone big said it was true.  If Wood were to write “I am not a philistine” on a cocktail napkin it would be hoisted aloft like a graven tablet.  This isn’t critical thinking – it’s magical thinking.  But Wood’s own reviews take this form of spurious argumentation all too often; his ephebes learned it on the master’s knee.  To say that Wood isn’t well served by his supporters is the same as saying he gets the supporters he deserves. 

It’s a curious thing:  the anti-Wood legions (suddenly there are so many of us, we’re told) are supposed to be caught crushingly off-guard by the list, yet it’s clear in all four posts that the list’s contents have surprised the Woodies themselves.  Those who’ve actually spent some time thinking critically about Wood’s work, on the other hand, will remember that the master himself has resorted to this strategy of trying to bury opponents under a seemingly diverse pile of names.  In his reply to the editors of n+1 magazine in 2005, attempting to rebut the charge of “narrowness,” Wood wrote the following: 

I have written in praise, and often at considerable length, of Norman Rush . . . José Saramago, Saul Bellow, Graham Swift, Jeffrey Eugenides, Philip Roth, Victor Pelevin, Alan Hollinghurst, Amit Chaudhuri, Monica Ali, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Kazuo Ishiguro, Muriel Spark, J.F. Powers, V.S. Pritchett, W.G. Sebald, J.M. Coetzee, Vikram Seth, Anne Enright, David Means, Geoff Dyer, David Bezmogis, James Kelman, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Yates, Francisco Goldman, V.S. Naipaul, and . . . Christina Stead . . . 

            […]

There is no obvious pattern here.  I am assumed to be a defender of “realism,” but I have skeptically reviewed Robert Stone and Tom Wolfe and John Irving, finding precisely their “realism” too conventional to deserve that noble and expansive word.  I am assumed to be an “aesthete,” but it is precisely John Updike’s aestheticism that has goaded me again and again into print in the last ten years.  I am assumed to be a “moralist,” but I like best to lose myself in the rich prose of a Bellow or a Melville or a Henry Green; probably no critic of contemporary fiction is more drawn to style and the enjoyment of style.  I love ideas in fiction, but not as Julian Barnes or Richard Powers practice them.  I praised Sabbath’s Theater and criticized The Human Stain; I was lukewarm about Disgrace but admired Elizabeth Costello. 

Those who have read this will hardly be blind-sided by Sarvas’s disinterred Guardian list (but then Wood’s opponents are generally better informed about his work than those who have adopted Jiminy Critic as their literary conscience). 

The point isn’t what books Wood might put on such a list, but how he reads them.  As I wrote a few months ago about Wood’s n+1 reply: 

To understand it . . . we have to look behind the sleight-of-hand of his “There is no obvious pattern here.”  Once one has read a critical mass of his actual reviews, one sees that there is indeed an “obvious pattern.”  He might award positive notices to what are arguably some quite different novels, but he awards them for more or less the same reason:  because they have (or can be construed as having) depictions of supposedly autonomous human consciousness.  They are all, in one way or another, versions of the “novel of character” he called for in his Franzen essay, and which he counterposed to the nemesis of hysterical realism.  Certainly a critic needs critical standards, but in Wood’s case, as in Procrustes’, the application of the standard has a funny way of leaving its subjects – or victims – standardized. 

The essay, “What Chekhov Meant by Life,” from his first collection, The Broken Estate, is programmatic in this regard.  Chekhov is Wood’s avatar of Negative Capability: “More completely than any writer before him Chekhov became his characters,” he writes.  Chekhov’s characters enjoy “true privacies,” which amounts to a kind of watershed in the history of literature:  “It is the movement of free consciousness in literature for perhaps the first time.”  He explains: 

Chekhov’s characters, however they yearn, they have one freedom that flows from his literary genius:  they act like free consciousnesses, and not as owned literary characters. This is not a negligible freedom.  For the great achievement of Chekhov’s brilliantly accidental style, his mimicking of the stream of the mind, is that it allows forgetfulness into fiction.  Buried deep in themselves, people forget themselves while thinking, and go on mental journeys.  Of course they do not exactly forget to be themselves.  They forget to act as purposeful fictional characters.  They mislay their scripts.

This is the desideratum – if a novel has this, it is good; if not, not.  It’s the summum bonum, which becomes the programme, which becomes the metric:  in review after review, for book after book, with a finally numbing regularity, the citing of these little moments (or their absence) in which characters reveal their ostensible ‘free, spontaneous’ human interiority.  What he says about Chekhov he says about Hamsun, what he says about Hamsun he says about Woolf.  The most important thing about Woolf’s technique, he writes, is that it “frees characters from the fiction which grips them; it lets characters forget, as it were, that they are thicketed in a novel.”  We, however, are never allowed to forget that we are straitjacketed in Wood’s criticism, which soon enough takes on an identikit quality:  pick up the sentence from the Woolf piece and plunk it right back down into the Chekhov essay (because the most important thing about Woolf’s technique, after all, is also the most important thing about Chekhov’s technique), or further back into the Shakespeare essay, or fast-forward it into his reviews of Monica Ali, Jeffrey Eugenides, or Norman Rush, of whose novel Mortals he writes, “its central achievement has to be the fidelity with which it represents consciousness.”  Or, for variety's sake, you could try his recent (June 2008) review of Rivka Galchen's first novel: "Atmospheric Disturbances is a novel of consciousness."  

Other examples could be adduced; they are there in Wood’s work for anyone who cares to read and think instead of genuflect.  It’s a little comic, actually, to consider the spectacle of a “critic” who asserts that the really salient, crucial thing about writers this diverse also happens to be the same thing.  It is reminiscent, in fact, of the way that the more intellectually-insecure grad students and mediocre, unimaginative academics deploy literary theory:  in article after numbing article we learn that literature exists only to demonstrate the eternal verities of (pick your theorist – Lacan, DeMan, Butler, etc.).  The only major difference with Wood is that instead of theory we get some warmed-over Christian humanism in a thinly secular guise.   

The Woodies point triumphantly to names such as Pynchon, DeLillo, Rushdie, and Morrison on the Guardian list, but when has Wood ever shown himself to be in sympathy with the kind of fiction these authors write?  Take the case of Pynchon:  Wood’s reviews of Mason & Dixon (reprinted in The Broken Estate) and Against the Day (here) – both strongly negative – do not take the approach of trying to account for the falling-off that must have occurred since the “soul aerating” and “conscience abrasing” wonders of V. and Crying of Lot 49, both of which appear on the list.  Instead, in the Mason & Dixon review Wood tells us that Pynchon hasn’t written a novel at all but rather “an allegorical picaresque,” and allegory, he goes on to explain, is simply inimical to the novel form.  Wood opens his review of Against the Day with one of his specious literary mini-histories, telling us in a spasm of Little England parochialism that the “two great currents of the novel” derive from Richardson and Fielding, but that the Fielding current – also Pynchon’s – is really more theatrical than novelistic, has done more harm than good, and ought to be avoided if one is interested in writing real novels.  But are V. and Crying of Lot 49 somehow different in kind than these later novels?  Do they represent Pynchon’s Richardsonian, non-allegorical “phase” or something?  Of course they don’t – the contradiction is not in Pynchon’s career but in Wood’s criticism. 

I urge everyone to read these two reviews for themselves the better to reflect on Pynchon’s appearance in the magical Guardian list.  Then go and reread Wood’s review of Underworld (in The Broken Estate) where he tells us not how DeLillo might have written the same kind of book better, but that he wrote the wrong kind of book.  Go read his review of Toni Morrison’s Paradise ("distastefully" discussed in my last post), which opens with Wood’s animadversions on why magical realism in the novel is illegitimate and even morally destructive.  Again – not poor execution of an otherwise acceptable mode of fiction-making, but the wrong kind of fiction-making. 

So what if he says he “liked” Beloved or White Noise or The Crying of Lot 49, and was perhaps even telling the truth?  What bearing could this possibly have when the mere assertion or claim is put into the balance with the actual texts of his reviews?  It’s a basic proposition of critical thought that new evidence (and this list was clearly news to the Woodies) should be evaluated in the context of what is already known, that the incidental detail should be placed in the larger picture.  Go and do your homework, ephebes and Woodies, before you embarrass yourselves crowing about names on lists.  Think for a change, instead of just swallowing Wood.

The Critic as Cracker: James Wood's Sister Souljah Moment

While the memory of Colson Whitehead’s payback is still fresh in everyone’s memory, it might be a good time to revisit James Wood’s other – and even more virulent and cynically opportunistic – trashing of an African-American novelist.  I’ve called Wood “the ultimate Blairite critic,” and when it comes to African-American writers, he vividly proves himself to be a true disciple of the Clinton-Blair “Third Way” (i.e., the Reagan-Thatcher way with a dab of KY-Jelly). 

Clinton ran for president in 1992 under the auspices of the Democratic Leadership Council, an initiative meant to steer the Democratic Party in a more hawkish, neoliberal direction under the cover of re-aligning it with a mythical political “center.”  This initiative, it is worth remarking, was enthusiastically supported by Wood’s future employer, The New Republic, which throughout the eighties and nineties basically functioned as a DLC brain-trust (Martin Peretz has been a longtime supporter of Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman).  A central tenet of the DLC philosophy was the necessity of freeing the party from the heavy shackles of the Civil Rights movement and disciplining the expectations of the party’s Black supporters.  This would leave the new “centrist” Democrats free to continue prosecuting the “War on Drugs” and “War on Crime” (i.e., the war on Black men) and even to undertake some ambitious policy initiatives of their own, such as “ending welfare as we know it” (i.e., extending the war to Black women and children).  It was crucial, coming out of the gate, for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to demonstrate his fealty to US white supremacy. 

Clinton did this in two ways.  He interrupted his campaign and flew back to Little Rock to oversee the state’s lynching of a Black death-row inmate, Ricky Ray Rector, whose suicide attempt after the commission of his crime had left him too brain-damaged to understand the sentence being carried out against him.  Clinton’s second performance, less heinous but more headline-grabbing, was his public dissing of Sister Souljah at a Jesse Jackson-sponsored Rainbow Coalition event. 

The alacrity with which James Wood proved himself to be an ideological “fit” at The New Republic is truly impressive.  I’ve already mentioned his 1996 hatchet-job on George Steiner, who by an amazing coincidence just happened to be loathed by Martin Peretz.  Perhaps there was a similar alignment of planets on the night that Wood spontaneously decided to rig a “Sister Souljah moment” of his own – his review of Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel Paradise.  Unfortunately this essay is not available online, but readers may find it reprinted in Wood’s collection, The Broken Estate:  Essays on Literature and Belief under the title, “Toni Morrison’s False Magic.”  I urge everyone to steal a copy of this book from the nearest Barnes & Noble and read the review for themselves.  Paradise is far from Morrison’s best book, and no bad book should ever be immune from a negative review, but the terms in which reviewers choose to cast their reviews are their own responsibility, and the terms Wood chooses to critique Paradise are very interesting indeed.

Wood opens the review with a blanket condemnation of magical realism, one of those tout court dismissals of entire fiction-making modes of which his campaign against so-called hysterical realism has come to stand as the preeminent example.  The problem with putting “magical” events in a novel, Wood argues, is not merely literary, “it is a moral problem.”  Glibly hiding his personal biases behind impersonal and plural pronouns (and a token Johnson allusion), Wood explains his moral problem: 

One can hardly claim that magical realism corrupts our sense of reality, for at any moment we can close the novel and go and kick a stone.  No, magic is most likely to corrupt our ability to judge unreality, it is likely to seduce our skepticism until it expires from unrequital; and hence magic corrupts our ability to judge fiction, which is a measured unreality.  Fiction is threatened by magic (and vice versa).  This is why most fiction is not magical, and why the great writers of magical tales – E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gogol, Kafka – are so densely realistic.

Actually, most fiction is not magical because we live in a secular age; when the world was not secular most fiction – from Gilgamesh and The Odyssey to The Divine Comedy and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – was plenty “magical” and got along fine.  But Wood is concerned with more important things than mere truth.  He warns us that too much miscegenation between magic and realism is “likely” to weaken “our” critical judgment about fiction and therefore eventually to weaken fiction itself.  For Wood the novel is a weak form, whose purity needs to be defended from the “threatening” intrusions of alien and illegitimate modes.  Even weaker, however, are its readers, who are all too “likely” to succumb to the Mandingo-like allure of magic’s “seduction.”  Wood’s use of “our” at this point is no more than a trick to dissimulate his condescension towards the “Common Reader.”  Wood likes to posture as their advocate, but because he knows their interests better than they do he often, alas, cannot rejoice to concur with them.  Instead – like a high-end version of those “concerned” busybodies who want to protect children from the corrupting sorcery of Harry Potter – he must defend them in loco parentis. 

But Wood’s argument is as illogical as it is patronizing.  That great works of fabulation do exist is so obvious an objection that even our agile reviewer cannot simply avoid it, so instead he turns it into a rare and elevated mystery, ringed tightly round by a select, masonic cadre of dead Europeans who anyway were actually – being European and all – doing realism.  Rhetorically it is meant to be forbidding and ex cathedra – don’t try this at home kids! – so that readers will simply gulp down the signifiers of authority and miss how completely the argument begs the question.  The fact is that “magic” is no more and no less appropriate for the novel than anything else; it is only a matter of how well or poorly it is done.  Skillful practitioners of fabulation compel our assent, unskillful practitioners fail to do so, and termites who subsist only on a diet of Wood might be surprised to learn that the list of skillful practitioners includes names such as Ishmael Reed, Angela Carter, Kobo Abe, and Juan Rulfo, in other words writers who might happen to possess, in addition to their skill, a melanin-rich complexion, a non-European address, or a vagina.  But Wood is less interested in logic and reality than in casting a spell of his own, trying to deploy his rhetorical authority in such a way that his readers will be discouraged from exercising a proper skepticism over his arguments.  Maybe he has a “moral problem” after all.   

Those who encounter “Toni Morrison’s False Magic” in its place towards the end of The Broken Estate may become aware of an odd contradiction.  So many of the earlier essays find Wood going into raptures about how good (realist) fiction conjures our belief, how it plumbs the mysteries of the human “soul,” etc.  In one essay he lauds Virginia Woolf as a fundamentally “mystical” writer; in the next essay he calls D.H. Lawrence one of the greatest “mystics” writing in English.  Suddenly, however, when it comes to Paradise, he is on the side of skepticism and reason against the seductions of “magic” and “superstition.”  Why is this?

Morrison’s talent – and she certainly has great novelistic talent – has been to combine magic, myth, and history, and to make of this a dignified superstition.  Her fiction, at best, is an examination of this superstition, and at worst, its ready choir.  In the best parts of Song of Solomon and Beloved, Morrison uses her fiction to narrate an African-American history which, because it has so often not been written or officially recorded, has become a necessary superstition – a myth, made of oral tellings and retellings.  Her often distinguished prose, with its flushed, oral cadences and vernacular stammer, attempts to become another of these retellings, a myth that is written down but that reads as if it were spoken.  In her most acute moments, Morrison works against this collusion, by telling stories about people who are suspicious of mythical history . . . [But] Paradise, her new novel, is a choir for superstition, and rarely an examination of it.

What a hodge-podge of colonialist atavisms.  Somebody needs to tell our benighted reviewer that just because history is written down doesn’t save it from being a myth, and that when it is “officially recorded” it is guaranteed to be one.  But for the colonist, written history is a rational scripture, oral history a howling wind.  Thus when Morrison appears (to Wood, anyway) to be handling the “necessary superstitions” of African-American history in a suitably detached manner, her prose is “dignified” and “distinguished” – i.e., it has the bearing of a Negro you can bring home to meet your parents, like Sidney Poitier or Joe Biden’s “clean, articulate” Barack Obama.  But when Morrison appears uncritically to embrace this history and participate in it, she is rolling in the aisles of a superstitious “choir.”  Woolf and Lawrence come out of a Judeo-Christian and European tradition; their magic is a limpid, beautiful “mysticism.”  Toni Morrison’s magic brokenly traces its lineage to Africa; it is “superstition” which must be treated with distance and skepticism.  It should come as no surprise that the magazine James Wood worked for when he wrote these words was the same one which, a few years earlier, had published the initial installment of The Bell Curve.

Stay tuned for Part 2.  While you're waiting, watch this.

Reactionary Road: James Wood Revisits Richard Yates

In a 2004 Guardian review of Blake Bailey’s biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty, James Wood gave the following evaluation of the author best known for Revolutionary Road:

Bailey's book, so densely researched and chattily peopled, is not just the biography of one writer's heroic struggle to be himself, but a portrait of a distinct literary scene:  that of minor American realist writers, who during the 60s and 70s began to fill university creative writing courses (Iowa being the most famous). Yates was in some ways a larger and broader talent than this world allowed; but he was prey to its limitations, too, above all its stubborn anti-intellectualism and its fixed conviction that fiction can have nothing to do with "ideas".

Bailey calls Yates a "great" writer, but he seems more often a beautiful minor craftsman. 

It’s a sober and sensible summing-up in a remarkably – for Wood, anyway – sober and sensible review.  It shows what sort of middling, inoffensive reviewer Wood might aspire to be if he weren’t always determined to write “his usual hectoring sermon,” as Dan Green once so pricelessly put it.  And it is right about Yates, too, a minor figure whose best work does no more than elevate him to the status of a major-minor.  The review even comes within spitting distance of the really crucial realization that Yates was limited by the very artistic means that enabled his work in the first place.  But to go further would mean to indict “realism” itself, whose bad-faith conventions and superceded protocols must necessarily consign any contemporary practitioner (not to mention critical advocate) to minor status.  That honesty, “tragic” or otherwise, eludes Wood. 

So instead, in his more recent New Yorker article on Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Wood doubles down on the bad faith.  There is an interesting and, I think, revealing difference between the earlier and the later reviews.  It’s not that Wood openly reverses his judgment and elevates Yates to a great or major figure, but the superlatives are noticeably more lavish – “the decade’s great, terrifying indictment of suburban surrender” and “a brilliant rewriting of Madame Bovary” are offered as blurb candidates – and the negatives are correspondingly more muted, with the overall verdict of “minor,” in particular, wholly omitted.  The difference between the two evaluations is still one of degree rather than kind, but pushed to the very threshold where the former turns into the latter – another few taps of the chisel and the bust would be ready for an alcove in eternity.  And the tone of the later article is different as well, more polemical and, yes, hectoring; the critic has mounted his hobby-horse again – it is James Wood, you might say, with a vengeance.  But revenge against what, or whom?  What accounts for this difference between the two Yates articles? 

Yates’s 1961 Revolutionary Road is a well-crafted instance of what amounts to an identifiable subgenre, the realist novel of suburban dysfunction, which grew out of the earlier (pre-WW2) novel of small-town dysfunction (such as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara) and which would grow into the dull-as-dishwater “minimalism” of Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie in the 80s.  If John Cheever was hailed as the “Chekhov of the suburbs,” some readers would like to claim Yates as that terrain’s Dostoevsky, but his work ultimately feels too merely “crafted” rather than wrung from its own inner imperative.  No doubt this is why Revolutionary Road is a favorite MFA-program novel – it is often the centerpiece of “Time Management in the Novel” workshops, for instance – where the “writing as craft” (i.e., paint by numbers) ethic prevails.  What realist “suburban dysfunction” novels have in common is the extent to which they almost invariably appear constrained by the very sensibility they purport to critique.  They are straitjacketed critiques of straitjackets, provincial novels of provincial narrowness, carefully staking out that “serious” middle ground – the suburbs, if you will – between the disorderly metropolis of actual literature and the vast acreage of commercial realism’s rural idiocy.*

Now that we know the score on Rev Road, let’s turn to the polemical heart of Wood’s sermon on the text of Yates:

Detractors of classic realism like to claim that it is the most complacent of narrative styles, because it never questions its own artifice. But “Revolutionary Road” is, essentially, a novel all about artifice, and thus about its own artifice. When Frank criticizes the suburbs for being insufficiently daring, his complacent ranting has the feel of a performance, no more successful than April Wheeler’s “The Petrified Forest.” But then Frank is always playing a role. He is introduced as a man who had “the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise (Why Pay More?)” As a student at Columbia, he played at being an intellectual—he was “a Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man.” He plays at being a father, and at being a husband. Later in the book, when he is trying to persuade April not to attempt the abortion, he decides that he must impress her as he had once done when they were young. He embarks on a long effort to dissuade her, which involves “a form of masculine flirtation that was as skillful as any girl’s.” He holds his head “unnaturally erect,” and takes care to arrange his features in “a virile frown” whenever he lights a cigarette. On Revolutionary Road, life has collapsed into advertising: his attempt at dissuasion is described by Yates as “a sales campaign.”

But, of course, a novel in which characters have become brand names—“a Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man”—is a novel that also raises the question: So what is a rounded literary character? Frank’s theatricality is a form of fiction-making, after all. When Mrs. Campbell, at the end of the novel, tells the new owners about the “tragedy” of the Wheelers, she does so in a spirit of corrosive and luxurious gossip—her voice, Yates says, had taken on “a voluptuous narrative pleasure.” But she is doing, in this sense, no more than the novel itself has done; and if we find Mrs. Campbell’s lingering and cruel narrative offensive we shall have also to judge Yates’s own lingering and cruel narrative, and our ready complicity in it. In its forty-seventh year, “Revolutionary Road” seems more radical than ever.

These almost comical contortions place this review at quite a distance from the sober evaluations of 2004.  Now we’re being asked to believe that a novel about characters who “wear masks” or which has self-dramatization as one of its themes is more or less the same as, say, a Luigi Pirandello play.  They’re all in the category of the radically self-reflexive artifact, you see, which is why any responsible teacher of literature can go ahead and substitute Yates’s Revolutionary Road for Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons on the syllabus, just like Wood does in his own Harvard courses.  And for graduate-level students ready to tackle advanced literary theory, he’s put Eric Berne’s classic of Transactional Analysis, Games People Play, on reserve at Widener Library.       

So what has made Wood become so strained and silly?  Or more accurately, what has provoked him to bring his evaluation of Yates in line with his usual standard of strained silliness?  For in most respects this is indeed a run-of-the-mill Wood review, yet another example of his insistent Restorationism, extolling what is traditional and conventional as somehow “advanced” and assimilating what is innovative back into the traditional.  But there is nonetheless an extra edge here, a more pronounced note of hysteria inflecting the desperate illogic of the central argument.  “Detractors of classic realism like to claim that it is the most complacent of narrative styles,” he writes.  Unfortunately there aren’t really so many of these detractors about, and most of them are confined to the “blogosphere.”  Is Wood now swiping at blog critics in the pages of the New Yorker? 

I think it’s rather that a critique bearing some resemblance to those which have been circulating among lit-bloggers hostile to mainstream realism had finally percolated up into a mainstream publication, in the form of Zadie Smith’s much-discussed “Two Paths for the Novel” in the New York Review of Books.  In that article, Smith arraigns a certain type of realist novel – exemplified by Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, much approved by Wood – on charges very similar to those we find Wood responding to in his Yates review, including the charge of “complacency.”  As welcome as Smith’s article was, I have the feeling that it was distilled from a largely unacknowledged tutorial at sites such as This Space, The Reading Experience, and Ready Steady Book, among others.  Whatever its origins, it showed that she had shaken off the case of Stockholm Syndrome that had once upon a time prompted her to thank Wood for putting the screws to her first book, and had marshaled her forces to critique, however implicitly, her critic.  Wood’s review of Revolutionary Road – in which he tortures his own logic instead of her book – must be seen as his rebuttal, equally indirect and so self-lamed as to be impotent.   

_________

* Of course, as novels such as Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland have shown, a fundamentally suburban novel can be written with an “urban” setting.