James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

[John Carvill]

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Here is Wood's full letter to the LRB:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/letters

Wood's criticisms (of both P and the review) are spot on.
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I feel Wood's opinions are, in addition to being sneeringly delivered,
not so much criticisms as misdirections, particularly this:

" Surely the issue
is not what a novel’s characters are (round, flat, major, minor,
caricature, sketch etc) but what a novelist does (or doesn’t do) with
them: what is seriously at stake in the entire novel of which they
form the fabric"

To me, it is not what an author does with *characters* that counts,
any more than it is to do with what he does with *plots* or *themes*.
Rather, it is what he does with *words* that matters. Many of teh
people whose books Wood seems to like are several strata below Pynchon
in terms of what they *can* do with words, imho.

The LRB review of Inherent Vice, by Thomas Jones, on the other hand,
is the best essay I have yet read on the book, the first piece of
proper criticism. For Wood to take just that one line about reading IV
replicating the experience of being stoned, is an utterly dishonest
way to make an argument.

By the wa, I can't tell you how glad I am that Mr Jackson doesn't like
'Against the Day'.

Cheers
J