* While we spend our time worrying about nasty reviews, over in the UK they're wondering if things haven't gotten too polite.
There is something wrong with our literary journalism. Too many book reviewers are too respectful of established reputations, their voices hushed, their opinions predictable and tentative. Too many reviewers are overcome by deference to say what they really think about the mediocre novels, especially if those novels are by writers of world renown.
* Maud Newton's review of The Last Chicken in America can be found in the Sunday NYTBR.
* J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year is called "something extraordinary" in the Nova Scotia News.
* Over at the Globe, Gail Caldwell admires William Trevor's short story collection.
However mournful in the world they portray, these stories possess an unwavering moral center that is itself a measure of greatness.
* Apparently, Ian McEwan's own thoughts on his novels will only get you a "B" at school.
* In inevitable post-Man-Booker "time to rethink the system" runs in the Observer. Elsewhere, the prize chairman's blog is criticized.
* Isabel Fonseca (also known as Mrs. Martin Amis) discusses autobiographical elements in her new novel, Attachment.
Martin Amis's wife writes in Attachment about an American woman who marries an Englishman and then moves abroad with him – as she did with her husband to Uruguay for three years in 2003 – but then goes on to describe in unsettling detail how their union begins to collapse as a result of her husband's infidelity. It is hard not to see Isabel and Martin in the leading characters, which makes the sudden twist in the plot quite devastating," a close friend of the couple who has seen the manuscript tells Mandrake.
* The superb Canadian publishing house Anasi Press is celebrating 40 years.
Wood inspires this level of passion at least partly because he is so decided—some would say dogmatic— a critic. He makes a religion of literature. Wood has written before about his upbringing in an evangelical sect of the Church of England, and about his subsequent and painful apostasy; in one book of criticism, The Broken Estate, he argues that meaningful engagement with literature has replaced interaction with religion; his first and thus far only novel is called The Book Against God. The absence of God, it seems, looms so large for Wood as to be a presence. It has become a commonplace to say that Wood has fashioned a substitute religion out of literature; less often noted is that he brings an evangelical zeal to his criticism. His essays reveal a fervor that would also be apposite to the pulpit. He excoriates, he admonishes, he despairs, he encourages, he acclaims. In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Wood has said as much: “There is an evangelical streak in me that wants to correct reviewers, ‘You have to see it this way. You have to see that X is good and Y is bad and you have to agree with me.’”
* And, finally, on your list of what to do this week - do check out fucktard slayer Tod Goldberg in conversation with his hero Richard Russo this Thursday. Tickets still available.
For those who can't make the event, be aware that I'm likely to do the entire interview as Silverblatt:
Richard, in your transcendent novel of and on the nature of sighs, and concerning the element of life that one might consider a bridge, if a bridge is like a span between two points, such that the world is made of bridges, both metaphorical and literal, like the Golden Gate, or the divide between 2Pac and Biggie which, as we know, is like that poem by Rilke, then we are to, indeed, be aware that, in essence, we are all connected.
Posted by: tod goldberg | October 22, 2007 at 11:21 AM
Am I the only one who found "Diary of a Bad Year" a bit thin on plot, characterization, insight and imagination?
Re: Amis's possible marital woes: those Nabokovian second-person asides as appear here and there in "Experience" will come to haunt and mock him.
(And am I the only one for whom those James Wood hyperlinks are such a weird tint against the background color that they're invisible? Or have I been drinking?)
Posted by: Steven Augustine | October 22, 2007 at 01:50 PM