Apparently Charles Mathews of the Mercury News hasn't read "Saltykov-Shchedrin, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Joseph Roth, Bohumil Hrabal, J.F. Powers" (for which Book Babe Margo Hammond surely lauds him), but that doesn't stop him from quite liking The Irresponsible Self - about which we do intend to write at length in the next week or two.
But unlike some other unsparing critics, Wood never seems intoxicated with his own venom. You can almost always see him trying to figure out where the writer went wrong. Writing about books that he regards as seriously flawed but still impressive, such as Zadie Smith's ``White Teeth'' and Jonathan Franzen's ``The Corrections,'' he observes: ``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. . . . Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned.''The success of such busily inventive writers as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace has inspired younger novelists, such as Smith and Franzen, into a frenzy of cleverness: ``The contemporary novel has such a desire to be clever about so many elements of life that it sometimes resembles a man who takes so many classes that he has no time to read: auditing abolishes composure.''
Joining in on the Wood coverage is the SF Chronicle's Larry Tritten, whose review seems to be far more about Tritten and his own credits and experiences than about Wood's book. It's a largely unilluminating read but it's here if you want it. (The review is also incorrect, or at least inaccurate - the cover photo is credited on the jacket as being from the Getty Archive. And the meaning of the picture is quite clear to me, as it should be to anyone who's actually paid attention to the book. But I'll save that for my own piece.)
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