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When Wood was ascending, it was briefly the other way around.
When Wood went negative, he tended to do so in a mode of rigorous disappointment.
Paranoia approaches knowledge from behind, Wood wrote, so that anything can be connected with anything …
Yet fictions task is to show where connections seem to end, the better for their vivid spread.
Henry James saw this in his preface toRoderick Hudson.
Wood migrated to the more polite pages ofTheNew Yorkerin 2007.
James Wood: I Wont Go Soft at theNew Yorker, read the headline in theNew York Observer.
It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence.
Stories and substories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.
Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs.
What was doing this embarrassing?
What were the novels competitors in the pursuit of vitality?
The usual suspects, of course film, television, and the culture of the image in general.
In other words, writers had substituted cheap vitality of image and information instead of delivering the real world.
Its no coincidence that such a substitution wouldnt have been possible in the 19th century.
This is the dark theme of Franzens novel; this is its truest touch.
But hes a failed intellectual and a noticer who sometimes seems to quiver before the world.
The comparison does the novel no favors, but it was inevitable.
It was as if Wood had turned to fiction only to give us a lesser version of himself.
The book, more charming than most first novels, was underrated.
Even Wood later referred to it, perhaps ironically, as a so-so novel.
As in that book, a prominent theme is the English experience of America.
whenever they ask?).
Within this tissue of mild estrangement, a family convenes because one of its members may be in crisis.
Such is the novels plot, and its dramatic moments are dealt in little nudges, never jolts.
Upstates setting in time is crucial to understanding whats in store for its characters.
The novel is pregnant with these possibilities, which are never stated.
This is a way for Wood to hold social news at bay without denying its reality.
Its an ingenious strategy and lends phantom force to a novel that resolutely insists on stillness instead of noise.
Family reconfiguration isUpstates overt theme, and that is treated with great subtlety and comic grace.
Sebald, Knausgaard, and Lerner) and look at the world through the lens of their professions.
(This is a sly personal watermark, as Wood is a drummer himself.)
Classifying and rating is an easy game for critics, and perhaps the least of our duties.
