Woodcutter's Weekend

From A.D. Jameson's critique of How Fiction Works at Big Other:

Literary critics are storytellers themselves, and we appraise them by how compelling, and how useful, we find their stories about fiction. Wood’s own account is smug and small. Again and again he dogmatically insists upon fiction that’s written in the third-person limited, that enlists only the most appropriate metaphors and details, that employs a language that’s musical but not over-aestheticized, and whose plot takes a definite backseat to the characters—the all-important characters!—who should “[serve] to illuminate an essential truth or characteristic” (128). By the time that Wood is finished carving away at fiction, little remains of the art form that I know and love. But James Wood, ever the arbiter, ever the tastemaker, desires only a certain fiction: one that’s primarily truthful, stylized but never over-stylized, and never intrusive—like Goldilocks’s chosen bowl of porridge, chair, and bed, it must be exceedingly, prissily just-so. Unsurprisingly, Wood’s preferred fiction is realist, and bourgeois, and 99.9% dead, white, and male.

From Justin Jamail's critique of Wood's Paul Auster review, posted at The Revealer:

Turning now to the conceptual gobbledygook and beginning with the silliest example: “Saramago and Roth,” Wood writes, “both assemble and disassemble their stories in ways that seem fundamentally grave. Auster, despite all the games, is the least ironic of contemporary writers.” Had I read that out of context I should have thought that the first sentence was meant to disparage Saramago and Roth and the second to praise Auster. If there’s one thing popular writing suffers from it’s a surfeit of gravity and irony. I don’t know who the most ironic of contemporary writers is, but I don’t think I would enjoy reading his or her books. I am, by the way, looking forward to Wood’s forthcoming monograph explaining his method for separating those things which are merely or seemingly grave from those which are “fundamentally” grave. Moreover, I wonder what the “gravity” of assembling (or disassembling, as the case may be) stories has to do with being an ironic contemporary writer. The juxtaposition of the sentences suggests that Wood felt a logical connection between the two sentences, but I cannot find one. It’s as if he had said, “Saramago and Roth are blue. Auster, despite not speaking Chinese, is carrot-colored.”

The notion that narrative “games” must have as their goal the sort of irony associated with post-war European and American post-modern writers betrays a comically limited approach. As it happens, the narrative “games” at work in Auster’s prose come directly out of nineteenth-century American writers such as Irving, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and, though an awareness of recent European and American literature is evident, the influence of post-war writing is slight. Wood makes no attempt to consider what it might mean for a contemporary writer to be so strongly connected to such nineteenth-century American writers (or, indeed, to those early and mid-twentieth century journalists and fiction writers whose influence is also felt in Auster). Complaining about Auster’s failure to live up to the standards of Saramago or Roth is like complaining that Chesterton doesn’t write like Dreiser: it’s as boring as a tautology and half as useful.

And from Claire Messud's "Writers, Plain and Simple," the introductory essay to her guest-edited fiction selection in the latest Guernica:

Just over ten years ago, the Modern Library compiled a list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century: only nine of them were by women, and Edith Wharton accounted for two books. Were there really only eight women writers of major significance in those 100 years? [ . . . ] When, in 2006, the New York Times ran a list of the best American fiction of the past twenty-five years, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was pronounced the winner; but she and Marilynne Robinson (for Housekeeping) were the only women out of twenty-two titles (and that’s counting Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and McCarthy’s Border trilogy as a single book each). Just last September, when the international literary magazine Wasafiri solicited responses from twenty-five global writers about the work that has most shaped world literature over the past quarter century, just four women—Elizabeth Bishop, Mildred Taylor, Toni Morrison, and Quarratulain Hyder—were on the list. And this is in a world where women account for 80 percent of fiction readers.

Hey Claire, while you're at it, let's not leave out your husband's widely-acclaimed masterpiece, How Fiction Works, whose bibliography of over 90 works consulted ("the books at hand in my study," in his words) included only 11 titles by women writers (with Woolf and George Eliot accounting for two titles each), about the same proportion as in that Modern Library list you justifiably criticize. (And, er, only a single African-American, since you seem to be concerned about underrepresented populations...)