NP - On James Wood

[alice wellintown]

But I do like Wood for a bunch of reasons and I recommend this little
book; it is dense with diamonds and the soles of shoes. On the
Americans, it seems to me, Wood is somehow off the mark; that he loves
Bellow so (though Bellow was born in Canada), for his ear, for his
music, his style, refutes the critique that he is a snob; he also
admires DH Lawrence and so I doubt it is a political bias or a bias
against the poltical or historical in art and literature (he admires
Woolf) ; he's not Nabokov, but he finds that P and others who write,
as he describes it, like Fielding, are makers of juvenile plots, of
plots upon plots upon plots, where hundreds of thinly sketched
characters set up a farcical follow the fellow, who follows he fellow,
who follows the fellow,  and then,  look!, over the rainbow we go,
look at me! This is not exacly, nor even if it were, is it all P does.

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 11:42 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
>> Booth, who does most of what Wood does much better
>
> What you said. (And as Booth has always acknowledged, Kenneth Burke taught
> him how.)
>