It's always a happy day in the TEV household when there's some new James Wood to dig into. OGIC directed us to his latest review available via The New Republic, this one looking at John Le Carre's Absolute Friends. It's not a book we're remotely interested in reading, but we remain fans of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and the essay is worth reading for Wood's deconstruction of that book alone.
Le Carré can write very well. In the passage that precedes Leamas's encounter with the passport officer, he writes that "the airport reminded Leamas of the war: machines, half hidden in the fog, waiting patiently for their masters; the resonant voices and their echoes, the sudden shout and the incongruous clip of a girl's heels on a stone floor; the roar of an engine that might have been at your elbow." This is suggestive, and almost lyrically skewed.
Overall, he finds the works wanting (including Spy) but no one writes a thoughtful takedown quite like Wood.
I must admit that I am a Le Carre fan, and I am not familiar with James Wood, but this review is pure sophistry. To suggest that Le Carre is not literary because his plots are "betrayed by the simplicity and the neatness" of his prose is specious at best, as though peppering one's writing with deliberately ambiguous phrases like "final unfinality" will elevate you to literary status. You might just as easily suggest that a fat wallet necessarily implies wealth. I did enjoy the "bald-faced illiteracies" crack.
Posted by: Sean | March 30, 2004 at 08:54 AM
I won't read this review for fear of discovering Wood's opinion on the invasion, and thereby hate him if he follows Leon Wieseltier's line. But I did skip to the final para and see the events described "George W. Bush's policy in Iraq". He should know better than use such euphemisms for mass murder.
Posted by: Steve of In Writing | March 30, 2004 at 09:49 AM
I'm with you, Sean-o. The last half is ingenuity wasted on something that's pretty obvious -- the badness of Le Carre's latest book.
The first half is right in some particulars, wrong overall. Le Carre's fiction obviously falls short of depicting the real world, where men are heroic and garrulous. Greene, Hem, and Le Carre are the worst of writers -- unless you consider all the rest.
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