http://sirenjournal.org/reviews-discussion/how-nonfiction-works-james-woods-the-fun-stuff-and-other-essays/
Lecturing at Bryn Mawr in 1965, the late critic Frank Kermode remarked “[i]t is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives.” Critics instead must “attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.” If Kermode’s role as a critic is a “lesser feat” than that of the novelist, the poet, the Artist (capital A), then the role of the critic will always be secondary. But anyone who has read Kermode does not lament he never wrote a novel; his nonfiction is too engaging, too intelligent.
Today nonfiction is, of course, everywhere—arguably too many places: Popular science; memoirs of celebrities and software company CEOs; micro-histories and macro-histories; miracle diets, morally obligatory “last lecture” inspirationals (as seen on Oprah), and a surfeit of self-help drivel. No doubt informative, possibly entertaining, never the less, because these genres privilege content over form, they require little in the way of artifice, little in the way of being written well. Can we enjoy nonfiction again? Fortunately, the literary essay, rooted in Montaigne, never quite went away. The essay (Montaigne’s word, “to try”), has grown: we read personal essays of experience; analytic meditations; lectures and essays of ideas; columns; lyric essays and nature essays; essays on literature, and film, and music. From E.B. White to Joan Didion to David Foster Wallace and Christopher Hitchens, the nonfiction essay has grown invaluably versatile.
And what of Frank Kermode’s critic, the critic of literature, of art? Literary criticism seldom reaches a general audience: so sheltered by academia, criticism means to be inaccessible, consciously steeped in esoteric vocabulary and pure verbiage. From criticism, one wants intelligent writing in what Wordsworth called “the real language of men”. Christopher Hitchens’ essays on literature, particularly on Orwell, may have come close to achieving that potent combination. Yet, even at Hitch’s best one wishes he had gotten his hands just a bit inkier, gone just a bit deeper into the text—he seldom bothered with footnotes or citations.
James Wood though, captures in his essays both intelligence and—how shall we say—panache. His readers catch his articles in The New Yorker where he has contributed since 2007. His now famous review of John Updike’s Terrorist recalls for us the delight of an intelligent and mercilessly “ripping” book review, as well as of what criticism is primarily for: to examine and expose; to sound out as defective that which isn’t quite ringing (but should be). Wood is fun to read, and he is challenging; but what makes him truly engaging is his intellectual seriousness. He executes his role as a critic in earnest, and one perceives his genuine sense of betrayal at a poorly written passage (an author overshadowing his meagerly sketched character in the case of Updike), or frustrated anger toward the cheap exaggerations of what he views as the “enormous condescension of postmodernism” in writers such as Tom Wolfe and Salman Rushdie. He is widely read in both classic and contemporary works, and is as good on the Old Testament and Flaubert as he is on Bellow and Norman Rush.
James Wood though, captures in his essays both intelligence and—how shall we say—panache. His readers catch his articles in The New Yorker where he has contributed since 2007. His now famous review of John Updike’s Terrorist recalls for us the delight of an intelligent and mercilessly “ripping” book review, as well as of what criticism is primarily for: to examine and expose; to sound out as defective that which isn’t quite ringing (but should be). Wood is fun to read, and he is challenging; but what makes him truly engaging is his intellectual seriousness. He executes his role as a critic in earnest, and one perceives his genuine sense of betrayal at a poorly written passage (an author overshadowing his meagerly sketched character in the case of Updike), or frustrated anger toward the cheap exaggerations of what he views as the “enormous condescension of postmodernism” in writers such as Tom Wolfe and Salman Rushdie. He is widely read in both classic and contemporary works, and is as good on the Old Testament and Flaubert as he is on Bellow and Norman Rush.
Wood’s latest collection of essays, (The Fun Stuff and Other Essays; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2012) unlike his previous publications, feels looser and more comfortable, if altogether less consciously ambitious. Rather than making a statement or setting out a critical method (Wood has already done so inHow Fiction Works, an examination and appreciation of literature), The Fun Stuff is just damn good writing. . The jacket states the book is a study of contemporary literature, but Wood has always mixed the canonical with the modern-day (see his reference to Robert Stone in his essay on Flaubert in The Broken Estate) and so The Fun Stuff is more suitably read as a mixture of essays that Wood felt like writing rather than a collection with an overarching theme.
In “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon” Wood writes with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up, jacket thrown over a chair. The successful literary critic is at his most casual, taking a break from Flaubert and Tolstoy to explore a more “poppy” subject: his own discovery and enjoyment of rock music, specifically the unrestrained Dionysian drumming of The Who’s Keith Moon. The essay is fun and fresh, and even in an essay on music Wood sprinkles references to literature here and there: you cannot separate the literary critic from the musicologist. In this passage, Wood recalls his childhood of classical music. Between his appreciation of classical music and his undeniable attraction to rock, a reference to Philip Roth slips in:
Nowadays, I see schoolkids bustling along the sidewalk, their large instrument cases strapped to them like diligent coffins, and I know their weight of obedience. Happy obedience, too: that cello or French horn brings lasting joy, and a repertoire more demanding and subtle than rock music’s. But fuck the laudable ideologies, as Roth’s Mickey Sabbath puts it: subtlety is not rebellion, and subtlety is not freedom, and sometimes it is rebellious freedom that one wants, and only rock music can deliver it. (11)
His admiration of rock’s ecstasies brings an excitement to his prose, an undeniable playfulness that you might sense—but more reigned in—in his essays on literature. This is Wood “letting loose,” and thoroughly enjoying himself. He says fuck, uses exclamation points wherever he pleases, makes a jab at the Eagles (who doesn’t?), and still sounds like he knows what he’s talking about—even when he’s gushing:
Noise, speed, rebellion: everyone secretly wants to play the drums, because hitting things, like yelling, returns us to the innocent violence of childhood…When you blow down an oboe, say, or pull a bow across a string, an infinitesimal, barely perceptible hesitation—the hesitation of vibration—separates the act and the sound…[b]ut when a drummer needs to make a drum sound, he just…hits it. The stick or hand comes down, and the skin bellows. (4)
Wood also sounds when struck, though by poor prose rather than a “stick or hand”. The essay on Paul Auster (“Paul Auster’s Shallowness”), a piece as favorable as the title suggests, recalls Wood’s review of John Updike’s Terrorist wherein Wood ruthlessly picked apart Updike’s transparent characterization of his American Muslim narrator. In How Fiction Works Wood uses Terrorist as a case study noting that, indeed, “good writers make mistakes”. Wood face-palms not over Auster’s preoccupation with the postmodern—cliché, bogus or borrowed dialogue—but out of despair with what the author fails to do with his own material:
Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work….Auster…does nothing with cliché except use it. Cliché is under no significant pressure in his work; it just holds its soft hands with firmer fingers in the usual way. (271-272)
For Wood this cliché is “ragingly unaffecting,” one of many cheap tricks Auster easily deploys, an authorial laziness that refuses the reader a revelation, substance, meaning. Meaninglessness, in a postmodern sense, often signifies some underlying truth of reality. Auster’s meaninglessness is just that: meaningless.
The classic formulations of postmodernism…emphasize the way that contemporary language abuts silence….language is always announcing its invalidity. Texts stutter and fragment, shred themselves around a void. Perhaps the strangest element of Auster’s reputation as an American postmodernist is that his language never registers this kind of absence at the level of the sentence. The void is all too speakable in 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. (278)
Wood closes The Fun Stuff with the personal piece “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library”. The critic reflects upon the burden of emptying his late father-in-law’s collection of four thousand books. Wood asks, What do the books we own say about us? We buy and collect and read and die, and the survivors are left to redistribute. He imagines all of his books suddenly carted off: how much lighter one might feel! Equally a joy and a burden, piles of books remind us of what we’ve yet and haven’t read; what we always been meaning to read; what looks nice on a shelf but really we know we’ll never actually read in this lifetime—the shortness of time nags at one looking over the workload of intellectual consumption for a lifetime. Wood never tells us how large is his own library, but one get the feeling his books will not be carted off anytime soon.
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