Walter Kirn certainly got up on the curmudgeon’s side of the bed the day he wrote his review of James Wood’s new book, “How Fiction Works” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24). The cover of The New York Times Book Review is generally reserved for raves, but on August 17, Kirn came out swinging. His disdain barely conceals his rage. Que pasa?
This is the first review I have read in which the reviewer mocks the author of the book about literature and writing for being too well-read. Wood, a well-known literary critic, essayist and reviewer who writes for The New Yorker, mentions at the beginning of “How Fiction Works” that the books he cites (94 novels and a handful of short stories) are from his own library; he didn’t go to a public or university library or order anything from Amazon, a fact that seems to inflame Kirn’s sarcasm. “Wood’s study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by [Wood’s] inarguable erudition,” he writes, making erudition sound like a particularly loathsome STD. Wood, says Kirn. “drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed.” How one could compose a book about how fiction (or anything else) works without using quotations and references defeats my imagination, and I would certainly hope that the author of such a book knew what he was talking about and possessed the background in reading and thinking — call it erudition — to write convincingly.
Having “the whole Western canon at his disposal, apparently” and conveying a “tone of genteel condescension,” the “vicarish” and “sequestered,” Wood, who possesses “a donnish, finicky persona,” “flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.” Ouch, talk about condescension! This is getting really personal. I Googled as hard as I could but I couldn’t find evidence that Wood, known for damaging reviews, attacked one of Kirn’s novels or dissed him personally. No, Kirn just freaking despises Wood and his book, and he makes no distinction between them.
Among Wood’s sins is that his author-heroes are “semimonastic introverts” like Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, writers who refuse to “let themselves be distracted and overwhelmed by the roar of the streets, the voices of the crowd,” in the way that one of Kirn’s heroes, David Foster Wallace, does (according to Kirn). I have to say that, having struggled through David Foster Wallace’s turgid prose and sophomoric satire, I think his writing bears as much resemblance to the authentic roar of the streets and voices of the crowds as Dr. Scholls does to Dr. Faustus. And what nonsense this is when Wood happily praises the exuberance of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the sneaky wit of Jane Austen and Muriel Spark.
Review
You have to give Laurie Notaro credit for some fun book titles. Her latest one “The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death” (Villard Books, $20) ranks with her other classics “I love Everyone (and Other Atrocious Lies)” and my personal favorite: “We Thought You Would be Prettier.”
Her book is a collection of random stories from her life. A few are hilarious. A few are dull. Some are downright disgusting. There are chapters that should be skipped or at least read when you aren’t eating or about to because they are about some nasty topics such as poop.
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Quick — take a look around your computer. What do you see?
Coffee cup stains, post-it notes, photos haphazardly taped to the wall, a cube wall overflowing with colorful leaves of paper, newspaper clippings, stickers, schedules and calendars, super hero action figures, photos and printouts of your favorite musicians, Far Side comics ripped out of a date book and taped to the wall, unopened bottles of juice, an ancient jar of peanuts, a bottle of body spray, a Mardi Gras mask and beads, fingernail clippers, a bottle of eye drops, an empty bottle of lotion, a tray of pennies, lots of dust, a stray ring and bracelet, a handwritten list of phone numbers, a stack of yellowed newspapers, an empty Altoids tin, an Apple sticker placed on top of a Dell logo, and wires wires wires everywhere you look?
Or do you see a pristine desk with a manicured inbox, push pins neatly aligned along your cube wall, a few carefully placed framed photos on your computer, and not a speck of dirt or dust to be found?
Or something completely different?
Sam Gosling, super snooper and author of Snoop: What your Stuff Says About You ($26, Basic Books), could look at your surroundings and tell you a lot about your personality — way beyond whether or not you’re a compulsively slobby hoarder (ahem) or an anal-retentive neat freak. Gosling has formulated fairly scientific ways of observing people’s surroundings — especially those they control and take pride in — and uses the data to determine a person’s level of openness, friendliness, neuroticism, originality, agreeableness, and more.
And best of all? He outlines lots of ways to help the common observer become an expert snooper, which can help anyone who cares to pay attention to the clues navigate the choppy waters of personal interaction.
”Indiana Jones and the White Witch,” by Martin CaidinBantam Books (paperback, 1994, 329 pages).Those of you who saw my review (which you can see HERE) of a previous installment in this series of adventures based on the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg movies may remember that my standards aren’t very high.
I don’t ask for much.
Just don’t bore me.
This one failed on that score.
Btw, these paperbacks were reissued this spring to capitalize on the latest movie.
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There are two common laments that average folks have about history: (1) They’re trying to rewrite it, and (2) they never taught me that in class.
While there are multiple reasons for both statements, one that they have in common is the limited amount of time that can be devoted to history in high school or college survey courses. If an educator only touches upon the basics of the American colonial period and then tries to get within the life experiences of his students, he faces the daunting task of cover at least 250 years worth of information in nine months or less. Thus there’s little time for that piece of the past between Columbus and the Declaration, an comparable amount of time.
It’s not uncommon, then, for most Americans to know little of the colonial era other than some thin understanding of the Pilgrims. Thus a nasty massacre of French Huguenots in Florida by the Spanish a half century earlier never gets mentioned. The story of how a Massachusetts woman carrying a hatchet — no, not Carrie Nation — and a handful of scalps became a hero is not one that gets celebrated at Thanksgiving. And perhaps as relevant to American history as the turkey were Queen Isabella’s pigs.
It’s not that you were absent the day these things were covered in class. Hardly anyone else heard of them either. Fortunately, Kenneth C. Davis, author of the bestselling “Don’t Know Much About History,” did stumble across these stories and ably wrote recorded them in his “America’s Hidden History, Untold Tales Of The First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, And Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation.” Davis continues on this theme, telling of George Washington’s culpability in a massacre that happened years before the American Revolution, how an egg-toss and a founding father in a toga figured into events in revolutionary Boston and some details about a group of little-known farmers who almost derailed the American experiment before the Constitution was even written.
“The Great Derangement:
A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire,”By Matt Taibbi(Spiegel & Grau, New York, $24, hardback, 270 pages)
This book has some real gems of insight — wisdom, even.
Check this one out, for example:
“When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.” (P.132)
Unfortunately, such valid points are scattered thinly — and with considerably more verbiage — through 270 pages of smarmy, self-righteous, arrogance trying to masquerade as humor.
Don’t get me wrong, I did laugh at some of this.
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The First Monday Book Club took a bit of a hiatus this summer. We decided not to read specific books and skipped our June meeting, but a group of us got together recently to sip wine at Davis-Kidd and catch up on what’s on everyone’s nightstand.
We thought we’d choose the best books from the summer as the basis of our book list when we officially get back together next month; each person chooses their favorite book and leads the discussion when the time comes.
In the past, we’ve mostly looked at a few summaries from online sources and tried to agree on something that sounded good. We’ve mixed in a classic (need to do more of those), some books that were getting a lot of buzz, and several books I’d already read so I could keep participating during an especially demanding grad class. It was time to change it up a bit.
I’ve heard all kinds of ways in which book clubs choose their titles: drawing titles out of hat, taking turns, voting. My co-blogger Bill Frazier (read his posts on American history here) recently gave me a few copies of Bookmarks magazine. In one, a club describes choosing books by “walking the plank” — walking down a book aisle, closing your eyes, reaching out to touch a spine and reading the book you touched. Might be a good way to find a hidden or forgotten gem.
How does your book club choose its selections?
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A small pink paperback book arrived recently, with a cover drawing of a lady (in the old-fashioned sense of that word) sitting up in bed in a pink dressing gown with fur trim and holding a martini glass. Title: “Live Alone and Like It” (Hatchette Book Group, $14). Subtitle: “The Classic Guide for the Single Woman.” Original publication date: 1936. It was written by then-Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis (1889-1971) and has a new introduction by Laurie Graff, whose contributions to contempo chick-lit include “You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs.”
I leafed through “Live Alone” expecting to find admonitions and advice that were dated and possibly offensive, therefore hilarious, and there was some of that. (Frank Crowninshield’s original intro advises the single lady to concentrate on “not talking about things she doesn’t understand to people who do, or about things she does to people who don’t” — yeah, good thing guys don’t ever do that — and “not wearing a backless gown when she has an over-vertebrate back” — words to live by.)
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So, I was dawdling in the book aisle at Target this weekend while my kids were salivating in Electronics, and I noticed that every other book cover in the Bestsellers section had a photograph of a woman or child with her (I think they were all of the female persuasion) back to camera.
Is this some new trend? Do people identify more with a character in a novel if they can’t see her face? Just wondering.
And now, like an annoying song your co-worker sings that you can’t get out of your head, you’re going to be noticing this trend every time you look at a display of popular books…
Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” has won the Best of the Booker.
The 1981 winner of the Man Booker Prize was the front-runner going into this one-off competition celebrating 40 years of the award. It had won the Booker of Bookers during the 25th anniversary celebration.
This time, though, the readers had a choice, kind of. A panel of literary-minded folks chosen by the Booker people narrowed the field to six books deemed worthy of the big prize and allowed the masses to choose the ultimate winner. Before the six were announced, reader polls showed Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” in first place. It didn’t make the short list.
The also-rans are: “The Ghost Road” by Pat Barker, “Oscar and Lucinda” by Peter Carey, “Disgrace” by J.M. Coetzee, “The Siege of Krishnapur” by J.G. Farrell and “The Conservationist” by Nadine Gordimer.
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