Even More Walser
Picador has just re-released James Wood’s first book of essays, The Broken Estate, with a new introduction by Wood.
We’ve got a new review by Morten Høi Jensen at The Quarterly Conversation, assessing the book with the added hindsight of a decade.
James Wood loves. His reputation as a crabby eccentric hacking his way through the garrulous brush of contemporary literature is undeserved; his is a criticism that supplants his fellow critics in its deep appreciation for what literature can do. Like Virginia Woolf (in many ways the critic Wood resembles most), his passion and engagement often takes the form of a quarrelsome vivacity, a fierce and frequently ruthless impatience with what Woolf memorably called “the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.” Last year, for instance, Wood penned a particularly disparaging review of new novel by Paul Auster for The New Yorker. Characteristic of his honesty and wit was a remark about the prolific nature of Auster’s work: “the pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager stamp collectors to get the latest issue.”
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I have to say that I find myself a bit stunned by how many people love that Wood loves to disparage (and indeed, just plain insult) some modern writers, including Paul Auster. First of all, his “criticisms” of Auster are just flat out boringly angry in addition to being totally wrong-headed. I find myself wondering if he’s angry at Auster personally for some perceived (or mis-perceived) snub that Auster is not even aware of, for Wood’s vitriol in that New Yorker review was palpable and, to me, inexplicable.
Secondly, Auster does not sell all that many books in the U.S., comparatively; if you look at numbers, all his sales come in Europe. You can say what you want (snottily) about that, too, but the fact of the matter is that Paul Auster is not, say, Stephen King or John Grisham, so the implication that he is made in the above quotation is really irritating.
Finally, this is the same Wood who also often disparages Delillo (again, baselessly, to my mind, ears, eyes, heart), whom I consider, much more than Auster (and I LOVE Auster’s work) a modern master in the true sense of the word, and someone whose works, I think, will stand the test of time. Everyone seems to ignore this.
Wood is a Puritan when it comes to literature. And I mean that, yes, disparagingly. His internal religious struggles overwhelm his own supposedly objective views of literature. I adore that he adores Bohumil Hrabal, but when he turns to writers with whom Hrabal seems to me to share some affinities, and lambasts them for absurd reasons, I cannot sanction it.
And I continue to completly NOT understand why most literary bloggers and online critical presences whom I admire very much seem to follow Wood around like he’s some kind of guru or god. I really just do not get it. Wood is completely full of crap at least 60% of the time; the other 40% he has some interesting things to say. But even his writing, on a sentence by sentence level, can be found wanting. And his recent “how to write a novel” (excuse me, How Fiction Works) was pretty much useless, and I was amused to see how embarrassed everyone was to say so–so they just didn’t say a whole lot. Rather than rip him to shreds the way he and Dale Peck and a few other morons do some great writers out there, they just kept mum.
I’m sorry to go on like this, but this guy gets my goat, and I’m also just plain tired of the cheap potshots taken at Auster all the time, as if he’s some literary heathen with zero talent who sells hundreds of millions of books. None of it is so.
Wow. What would inspire such strong hate, given that James Wood’s essays are quite often well constructed, regardless of whether there are flaws in his way of thinking. I personally admire Wood’s passion for the art of fiction. I appreciate his championing of writers that I admire (Saramago, Sebald, Bolaño, Camus, Bernhard, Woolf, etc.) and respect his takedown of writers that I like (McCarthy, Morrison, etc.). His criticisms are often cruel but at least he gave his reasons for it. It’s an aesthetic thing, and no matter how much I want Wood to like every writer I like, it’s not going to happen. I admire Wood’s thoughtful erudition that I never got so curious about Auster or DeLillo. It’s probably my loss. But there it is. I can live without these authors. Whether Auster is a bestseller in the US or in Europe or in Neptune is not the point here. The point here is that Wood doesn’t like Auster’s brand of fiction and you have to live with that. His arguments are on record. Why not answer his arguments in a more constructive manner? This kind of whining will not get one nowhere. These ad hominem attacks won’t get us far. It just highlights the shallowness of our taste whenever we try to defend an author without defending them in a more coherent way. At least Wood gives his personal reasons for his critique and they were given in a manner befitting a close reader. The elegance of his arguments may not persuade everybody but his ideas are there for everyone to answer in his own terms. Live with that.