If the Emperor Is Naked…
I was wondering why book people were so interested in the career move of James Wood from book critic at The New Republic to staff writer at The New Yorker, until this article explained it to me. In his time at The New Republic, Wood has criticized many of the writers who are held up as the pinnacle of today’s literature by esteemed institutions–writers like Philip Roth, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.
[Wood] is not indirect in his criticisms. The Nobel Laureate Morrison’s novel Paradise, Wood pronounced a few years back, “is a novel babyishly cradled in magic. It is sentimental, evasive, and cloudy.” DeLillo’s Underworld, he has written, “proves, once and for all, or so I must hope, the incompatibility of the political paranoid vision with great fiction.”
Apparently, Wood doesn’t like “‘hysterical realism,’ his coinage for books that attempt to convey the raucousness of contemporary life through outlandish proliferating plots, allegory, bizarre coincidence, and high irony”–so pretty much all the books that are held up by the establishment as important literature of our day.
And here’s why the move to The New Yorker is so interesting to folks:
Even his detractors concede that such takedowns are the fruits of a love for the novel — of a certain sort. But what does it mean that the most storied magazine in American history has aligned itself with a critic who essentially rejects the premises of a broad swath of contemporary American fiction?
That’s a good question. Here’s a person who doesn’t seem to like the aesthetics of major writers like, say, John Updike, taking a job at a magazine that Updike writes for. In other words, here’s a person who regularly points out faults of a certain kind of fiction getting to point them out to the audience of a magazine that helped legitimize that very same style of writing in the first place. What if Wood, gasp, actually changes the status quo here?
Well, sometimes the status quo needs challenging. While I like individual books by people like Pynchon/Roth/Morrison–no one can deny they are great writers–their work is often over-hyped. It’s as if critics have decided that these are the writers who will make up the next chapter of the Norton Anthology of Literature, the chapter English majors of the future will read to understand the literature of today. Someone, somewhere, decided that these are the people leading the aesthetic movement of our time, and therefore when one of these writers puts out a book, it is much more likely to get the attention, the good reviews, the awards, the top of lists, etc.
Of course, many brilliant writers are ignored in the process. But more interestingly, there are problems with the assumption that the highly ironic, jammed-packed, complex books these writers write are reflections of modern America. As the article puts it, “a messy, sprawling country demands comparable novels.” That may be true, in part, but America has to be demanding other kinds of novels by now as well. How much can really be said about consumerism and paranoia and alienation in America at this point? It seems like we covered those topics pretty thoroughly in the 1970s. Nothing has changed in the last 30-odd years?
If, like me, you believe the role of art is to reveal and reflect life, some of these books can come off as a little too cartoonish, a little too much like the writer is showing off. Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still good books, but as Wood himself says in the article, “people are still dying around us, having children, making friends. Without wanting to make fiction domestic in a dreary, writing-workshop way, you do feel a lack of these experiences in fiction.”
Maybe that’s why books like Gilead, about religion and the love between a father and son, feel like such a breath of fresh air to me. Maybe that’s why Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about death and grief, did so well. The human experience is a poignant thing, as anyone who has lived any of it can tell you, and it is a continual consternation to writers that language can never fully cover those experiences. I think writers are scared of topics like love/death/friendship/etc. because it’s so hard to say anything new or concrete about them, so they escape into acrobatics and vivid imagery and wordplay. But without the meaning underneath, these tricks can ring hollow. As Wood said in the article: “If you love Bellow, you love exuberance and stylistic showing off. That is exactly my complaint against someone like Rushdie. It’s not style, it’s all noise.”
And if Wood can reasonably point out the difference in his new post at The New Yorker, then more power to him.
Link via Bookslut.
