The Elegant Assassin

[Dave Monroe]

The elegant assassin
How an Englishman in Somerville is becoming the most feared man in
American letters

By Christopher Shea  |  August 26, 2007

THE BLOOD PRESSURE of some of America's leading novelists no doubt
just shot up: James Wood, The New Republic's famously stringent book
critic -- scourge of John Updike, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don
DeLillo -- has jumped to The New Yorker, giving him a much wider
audience for his coolly incendiary literary sermons.

[...]

Wood is controversial partly for his unusually clear (his detractors
say crabbed) ideas about what a great novel is -- or, rather, isn't.
He is especially set against "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. In other words: Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, much of David
Foster Wallace, the first two Zadie Smith books, and half of "The
Corrections," by Jonathan Franzen....

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/08/26/the_elegant_assassin/