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May 12, 2009

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"A genre is hardening. It is becoming possible to describe today’s "big, ambitious novel." Familial resemblances are asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: Dickens."James Wood. Hysterical Realism

"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies." Karl Marx. The Communist...more "A genre is hardening. It is becoming possible to describe today’s "big, ambitious novel." Familial resemblances are asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: Dickens."James Wood. Hysterical Realism

"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies." Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto

Both of these opening sallies conjure the ominous and share a rhythmic persuasiveness that holds reader attention hostage. Both, too, vibrate with the sincerity of deeply held belief. They exemplify what Northrop Frye has defined as High Style. Sentences that seem to come from inside ourselves, as though the soul itself were remembering what it had been told so long ago, unmistakably heard in the voice of an individual facing a mob, or some incarnation of the mob spirit. Both men argue against dehumanization, Marx in commerce, Wood in literature.

Here again is Wood, attacking the mob; outing the enemy:

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs. Such recent novels as Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, DeLillo’s Underworld, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges."

The conventions of realism are not being abolished, he continues, but exhausted, overworked. "Such diversity! So many stories! So many weird and funky characters! Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation… props of the imagination, meaning’s toys… The existence of vitality is mistaken for the drama of vitality…Connections are merely conceptual, rather than human. It is all shiny externality, a caricature."

So smells the skunk Wood throws at contemporary, primarily American, novelists. There’s no mistaking its odor. In his essay Anna Karenina and Characterization we learn, with equal clarity, what he prefers: Tolstoy’s characters, and the comfort with which they move and live in their own skins. As with Shakespeare, "they feel real to us in part because they feel so real to themselves, take their own universes for granted." Tolstoy starts with a description of the body which fixes a character’s essence, says Wood, essences referred to repeatedly in the novel. Wood uses Tolstoyean characters as yard sticks throughout the rest of his essays to repeatedly beat the Dickens out of novels that lack human detail and dynamism.

Writing about German author Wilhelm Von Polenz, Tolstoy himself suggests that the greatest novelists love their characters and add little details which force readers to pity and love them as well, notwithstanding all their coarseness and cruelty. Chekhov, whose name is also invoked throughout Wood’s oeuvre, is repeatedly praised as an exemplar of such an author, one who resists conclusion, and loves his characters from afar.

Wood tells us with precise, bold, often unbelievably beautiful artistry exactly what is good, and how and why it’s good. Isaac Babel’s ‘atomic’ prose is unique because of its discontinuities and exaggeration. "If his stories progress sideways, sliding from unconnected sentence to sentence, then the very sentences vault forward within themselves at the same moment." J.M. Coetzee’s distinguished novels, "feed on exclusion; they are intelligently starved. One always feels with this writer a zeal of omission." "Bellow’s writing reaches for life, for the human gust." "…it is Bellow’s genius to see the lobsters ‘crowded to the glass’ and their feelers bent by that glass -to see the riot of life in the dead peace of things." Henry Green’s "fine determination not to prosecute a purpose…creates an exquisitely unpressing art, unlike any other. "

Wood’s essays typically start with pungent, seemingly incontrovertible axioms. "Fury, a novel that exhausts negative superlatives, that is likely...

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May 15, 2009

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May 12, 2009

Nigel Beale rated it:

(review of isbn 1844130975)

Read in October, 2007

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