Wood & Henry James (critic)

[alice wellintown]

> - random thought - is it slightly true to say the purpose of academic
> writing is to settle something, while the purpose of fiction is to
> stir something up?

 Recent mention of Franzen's polemical essay, of Frye's Polemical
Introduction, of Pynchon's argument about Luddite and science fiction
and he defense of fictions that insist on violations of the laws of
nature -- of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality
itself...Wood's characterization of Franzen and Pynchon as Hysterical
Realists, Smith's co-opting of the phrase...these all suggest that
writers, irrespective of the form, often cross their purposes up, so
Wood is a novelist who tries to practice what he preaches but fails to
produce a work of art worthy of our efforts, but succeeds at stirring
up authors of fiction and critics and readers (common and uncommon and
whatever other silly adjectives we set down in front of the dear
reader).