The Fun Stuff

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By James Wood

Publisher Description

Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works—books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation—The Fun Stuff confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches—that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov—Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Aleksandar Hemon, and Michel Houellebecq. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming—which was a finalist for last year's National Magazine Awards—as well as Wood's essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.

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2 Reviews

4.0

Mark M.

Created over 11 years ago

don Bart

Created about 12 years ago

“After a brief foray into something less with How Fiction Works, James Wood returns to top form with this collection of critical essays he wrote between 2004 and 2011. We are lucky to have him. He is best when he satirizes authors, and he is best at it because he reviews authors more than individual works, which is not to say that he reviews their biographies very much at all. His criticism is the neat trick of including only what is found in the works themselves, or is found to have influenced the works, and nearly nothing more. His satires are pointedly unfair, as he admits in his criticism of Paul Auster, but they come nearer the truth of his subjects' prose than pages and pages of routine criticism might. And he writes the satires - and he is good at the satires - because he cannot help himself: I spent too much time, while reading this often beautiful novel, itching to write a parody of (Alan) Hollinghurst's Jamesianism. (p. 311) Wood is a remarkably good writer himself - an extraordinary reader with a fantastic eloquence lacking only the imaginative spark required to make him the novelist he very apparently, at times, wishes to be. Some examples of his prose: (Marilynne Robinson) is a liberal in the sense that she finds it difficult to write directly about the content of her belief, and shuns the evangelical childishness of gluing human attributes on to God. (p. 164) and The Frenchness, the spare forms, and (Lydia Davis's) philosophical rigor, among other things, made her work glamorous in literary circles. It was all too easy to peer down the stretched telescope of the "writer's writer" and see a fashionably limited dot. (p. 173) and (Ian) McEwen plays on the complacency of middlebrow readerly expectation, whereby, with the help of detailed verisimilitude, readers tend to turn fiction into fact. (p. 192) and That first novel was Revolutionary Road, and it could be said to have dissolved its creator's career even as it founded it, because (Richard) Yates never published a novel half as good again. Brutally put, he had about ten good years. His later fiction was compulsive but not compelling, necessary to him but not to his readers, who would always chase the fire of his first novel in the embers of its successors. (p. 195) Wood writes with greatest insight, unsurprisingly, about fellow Brits. His essay on the complexities of George Orwell is a highlight of The Fun Stuff: This combination of conservatism and radicalism, of political sleepiness and insomnia, this centuries-long brotherhood of gamekeeper and poacher, which Orwell called "the English genius," was also Orwell's genius, finding in English life its own ideological brotherhood. (p. 227) Wood does the masterpieces of Thomas Hardy justice too: Yet while one is always aware of Flaubert aesthetically shaping his details, squeezing out the chilly gel of their chosenness, Hardy seems to treat simile and metaphor as a mode of quick warmth, a way to bring an alternative life onto the page, without too much thinking about it. (p. 245) and then Remove the aspirant mother and half of English literature would disappear. (p. 247) But finally, Wood is at his best when his satire turns savage and when, in the course of immersing himself in a writer's canon and finding too much to satirize, he judges harshly. His writing, then, is probably at its best when it goes after Paul Auster: Cliche is under no significant pressure in his work; it just holds its soft hands with firmer words in the usual way. (p. 272) and There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along. But Auster is not a realist writer, of course. Or rather, his local narrative procedures are indeed uninterestingly realist, while his larger narrative games are antirealist or surrealist; which is a fancy way of saying that his sentences and paragraphs are quite conventional, and obey the laws of physics and chemistry, and his larger plots are almost always ridiculous. (p. 273) and finally The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager collectors to get the latest issue. (p. 278) There may be no better seven to nine hours a reader could spend in 2013 than with this book.”

About James Wood

James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. He is the author of How Fiction Works, as well as two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and a novel, The Book Against God, all published by FSG.