Many people consider James Wood as the best book critic around today. I’m one of them. But what makes James Wood so good is his versatility. The essay that opens this book, “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon,” told me a lot about drummer for The Who that I didn’t know. And I immediately wanted to drop everything and listen to Keith Moon play. After reading Wood’s essay on Edmund Wilson, I wanted to drop everything and read my Library of America volumes of Wilson’s work. You get the idea. Good critics motivate you to read (or listen) to the subjects of their reviews. After reading Wood’s essay on George Orwell, it would be hard to resist reading some Orwell. James Woods’ essays range from current novels to literary classics. His knowledge is impressive. The most compelling essay in this book is “Wounder and Wounded,” an essay on Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul admits to beating his lover, Margaret Gooding, saying, “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand… Her face was bad. She couldn’t really appear in public.” Wood lets the readers draw their own conclusions about the Nobel Laureate. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon 3
W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz 18
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 30
Thinking: Norman Rush 39
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 52
Edmund Wilson 66
Aleksandar Hemon 91
Beyond a Boundary: Netherland as Postcolonial Novel 102
Wounder and Wounded 117
Robert Alter and the King James Bible 130
Tolstoy’s War and Peace 145
Marilynne Robinson 162
Lydia Davis 171
Containment: Trauma and Manipulation in Ian McEwan 182
Richard Yates 194
George Orwell’s Very English Revolution 206
“Unfathomable!” (Mikhail Lermontov) 229
Thomas Hardy 243
Geoff Dyer 258
Paul Auster’s Shallowness 267
“Reality Examined to the Point of Madness”: László Krasznahorkai 279
Ismail Kadare 292
Eglish Muddle: Alan Hollinghurst 309
Life’s White Machine: Ben Lerner 322
Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library 329
Acknowledgments 341
Hoping my library has this. It looks great.
Patti, James Wood is the best book critic and this book proves it.
It certainly sounds good.
Jeff, you’ll love Wood’s essays.
Seems there’s a lot of dropping everything going on at your place. The essay title that caught my eye was Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library. What did he have to say in that one?
Rick, “Packing My Father-in Law’s Library” was a touching story that’s becoming all too common: what to do with someone else’s library when they die. Wood’s father-in-law had over 4000 books, many of them rare. But finding a home to a large collection wasn’t easy.