The modern bestiary Book

Twenty-two essays from the Durham-born finger-drumming superstar (no Wood, I won’t let that lie) and part-time Harvard professor and New Yorker hack. Wood is unique as a critic as he snipes at the level of the sentence, where other reviewers may linger on theme, imagery, context. He rolls up his sleeves for delicious close readings of all his books and will not let those tonal lurches, authorial intrusions and pesky non sequiturs lie. Often he misuses his examples: sometimes he’s diagnosing a wider malaise with technique within an author’s corpus, sometimes it seems like clever-dick point-scoring. The essay of interest to the layman in this collection is his piece ‘Hysterical realism,’ where he invents a subgenre of literature within a review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Pretty gutsy stuff. Lumping Delillo, Pynchon, Rushdie, Smith and Foster Wallace together wasn’t the wisest move, but gutsy still applies, and that essay is as important and convincing as any post-postmodern theorising. As for the rest, they’re all localised to one author per piece: we have riotous excoriations of Rushdie, Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen on one side, and eighteen or so giddy exhortations of his lesser-known favourites on the other, among them Italo Svevo, J.F. Powers and Monica Ali. Reading these pieces can be frustrating if you are unfamiliar with the work—either he piques your interest immensely (as in the case of Shchedrin and Bellow) or locks you out the love-in by being so damn particular. Also, Wood’s idea of comedy seems more gentle and subtle than satirical or ironical, making the humour explored in the texts often dryer than a Kenyan wheat paddy. Such is humour. Overall, an overlong but beguiling bounty.