James Wood

Yesterday on The New York Times' Paper Cuts book blog, Times Book Review and 'Week in Review' editor Sam Tanenhaus took a look at James Wood's How Fiction Works, specifically, Mr. Wood's critique of John Updike.

As Mr. Tanenhaus writes, "Wood suggests that Updike’s fiction doesn’t work very well at all, in part because Updike’s prose, like Vladimir Nabokov’s, is oversaturated with pointillist descriptions that, Wood objects, 'freeze detail into a cult of itself.'" He then goes on to quote a particularly florid passage from Mr. Updike's Of the Farm, which Mr. Wood thinks is "an exaggeration of the noticing eye."  read more »

Remember that scene in Annie Hall where some blowhard is standing in line for movie tickets and loudly saying things about Marshall McLuhan? And then McLuhan himself shows up and tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?

Literary critic James Wood kind of did that last night with an item on New York magazine’s Vulture blog. The item was based on a piece in yesterday’s Observer that asked whether Wood’s criticism—which we said has always been "uncommonly and unapologetically prescriptive"—was influencing aspiring writers.

Vulture briefly summarized our piece, referring at the top to Wood’s new  read more »

What will become of 37-year-old NBC News correspondent David Gregory, wonders Felix Gillette, since "lame-duck presidents create lame-duck White House correspondents."

John Koblin looks at the new advertiser-friendly glossies on the horizon—WSJ from The Wall Street Journal, FW from The Washington Post, Manhattan and others—and notes, "the traditional, cozily amorphous job of the editor—rumpled visionary, bold procurer, acid social critic, lover of words!—is starting to look very different. Sort of...crisper... As envisioned by businesspeople, the New Editor seems a kind of bland, affable and well-connected creature … much like, well, a businessperson."

Is The New Yorker's James Wood becoming a guru for writers? Leon Neyfakh checks out the tips offered in Mr. Wood's new book, How Fiction Works, and asks, "Who will heed them? And will the fact that Mr. Wood has laid them out so plainly in this succinct volume—something few literary critics, to say nothing of book reviewers, have the heart to do these days—increase the likelihood that aspiring writers will eventually absorb and adhere to his standards?" Plus: David Carr.

Plus: Madonna's brother... Issac Mizrahi... The New Old Gays.

Mark Sarvas has read James Wood’s new book three times already. That’s a lot, especially considering Farrar Straus & Giroux, its U.S. publisher, only put it out yesterday. But Mr. Sarvas, a lit blogger (his site is called The Elegant Variation) who recently published his first novel, really, really likes James Wood. He has a Google alert on his name, even, and thinks this new book he’s written, a concise and spirited defense of realism called How Fiction Works, is going to be “a key text of this age.”

“It just feels fundamental to me,” Mr. Sarvas said Monday. “I’m going to urge it on anyone who’s thinking about setting pen to paper to write a novel.  read more »

How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pages, $24

James Wood is in relax mode. That doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge, or that he can’t get excited—enthusiasm is still his best party trick: He gushes like Old Faithful. But these days he’s got nothing left to prove, no one to elbow out of the way. He’s the undisputed champ. If the poet laureate had a critic laureate to keep her company, James Wood would be he—why else would Harvard have appointed him professor of the practice of literary criticism? Why else would The New Yorker have poached him last year from The New Republic?

Of course, he still needs an audience—readers willing to read about reading and writing—and perhaps relax mode is Mr.  read more »

In the back of The New Republic this week is a glowing review by Frank Kermode of James Wood's forthcoming book How Fiction Works.

Wood, of course, spent twelve years as The New Republic's chief literary critic before abruptly leaving last summer for a staff job at The New Yorker. And so, while it's not the liveliest piece in the world ("Commentary of the kind here offered will very often give rise to conflicting readings, and I do not often find myself in serious dispute with the author. Wood's book is full of acceptable insights on a long list of novelists and topics..."), Mr. Kermode's review is a compelling one when you consider just how much The New Republic meant to Mr. Wood during those twelve years, and how much he meant to it.

“12 years seemed like a long inning, a respectable length of service. It was time for a change.”  read more »