NP - On James Wood

[alice wellintown]

Looking at Wood's books, I can't help but notice the irony in his
critiques of Pynchon:

P, Wood maintains, writes for himself, to show off, to amuse himself
with his crude and juvenile jigs and jibes. In his famous or infamous
essay on Pynchon and Melville, Wood complains that P writes with an
allegorical hand that is visible but pointing everywhere, and thus,
nowhere; P's allegoricals spin like a weather vane in the winds.  The
Broken Estate, Wood claims, makes of the German Rocket & the White
Cock of Western Scientific Hubris (Gnosticism), an allegorical
filibuster that hysterically screams across the stage and then is
heard some more, and some more, and some more, as it sputters on the
launchpad, goes whistling into the west wind, then lands with
absurdity in the theatre/theater of overdetermined postmodernists
proliferating.

Wood doesn't write for the common reader of genre fictions, nor for
the academic or professional critic, nor even for the passionate
readers of classics and literature. Wood writes for himself. This is
one of the reasons his fictions are not worth reading. Wood, like
Pynchon, often writes for the mirror. He is in love with his love of
Henry James; he begins with James, claiming that one must keep cool
but care for the cookery if one is to taste the recipe. But for Wood,
though he acknowledges that fiction is both artifice and
verisimilitude, too much artifice reduces fiction to a lower form. As
I've argued here several times, Wood seems ignorant of so much
American Literature; he seems to deny the Americans their declaration
of literary independence; in fiction, this happened after Emerson, so,
with the Romance. And, while Hawthorne, in one of his famous Prefaces
(HSG, I think) cautioned authors against too much artifice and magic,
he set down several, including HSG, that make Toni Morrison, Pynchon,
Faulkner, McCarthy as American as Apple Pie. Unlike Tanner, whose love
of American Literature is based on his study of and incredible
insights about the tradition, Wood views Americans as still struggling
to find a voice and a style. Wood insists, and it is a nice thing to
work with, that a novel teaches us how it must be read or how to read
the narrator; this kind of stuff is useful and easier to grab from
Wood than from others like Booth, who does most of what Wood does much
better. Distance, for example, and free-indirect speech, these are not
Wood's inventions or insights, and have become standard critical or
rhetorical tools. That Wood is correct, and very good, on, say,
James's use of FDS and multiple perspectives, does not make him
correct in his critique of P's use of FDS and perspectives. It is his
preference, only. Though his complaint about DFW and Pynchon on this
topic, how both slide into hysterical aping of character speech for
pages on end, even when said speech is ugly, has some merit, it is
hardly an argument that Pynchon is a Fielding in postmodern pajamas.
Ilike Wood; there is much there to learn from, but I think he needs to
read more about America and its rich literature if he is to convince
us that he is writing about us and not him.