Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019 by James Wood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
How do I dare write a review of a collection of essays by one of our best literary critics? With trepidation, some idiosyncratic choices of which ones to read and which ones to skip, and a certain recklessness. Which all let me fall on my face. Oh, well, so be it.
I started by skipping the first essay, “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon.” I do not like rock music, the Who, or Keith Moon. But as I leafed forward to the next, the final paragraph caught my eye: Wood’s affectionate mention of the two versions of the Goldberg Variations recorded by Glenn Gould – a beloved topic in our house, and in which he agrees with me. So: when it comes to Wood, there be gems buried even among the apparent dross. From Moon (ick) to Chekhov (yay!), Bellow (whom he admires and I can’t bear) to Austen, Cormac McCarthy (not in my house) to Dostoevsky’s God (not that he himself isn’t nearly one). And just as I was getting very testy with him about his criticisms of Dickens’s writing and characters (see my defense of those beloved people HERE), he delights me with a shrewd and loving observation on what saves them: “Yet in Dickens there is always an immediate access to strong feeling, which tears the puppetry of his people breaks their casings, and lets us enter them. Mr. Micawber may be a caricature, a simple, univocal essence, but he feels, and he makes us feel.” You are forgiven, Mr. Wood, and I’m going to steal those lines and add them to my blog post.
Even when discussing a writer whom I have tried to read and turned away from for good and all (McCarthy), Wood satisfies because he is not afraid to voice the criticisms, to point out where they fall short or fail outright, but can explain to a skeptic what he may be trying to do, what he IS in fact achieving, and how he does it. Sometimes it’s puzzling: he cites a paragraph from The Road as “gorgeous,” which I have read a dozen times and still can’t make sense of. But I learned something. The Melville essay is a long, dense, very difficult slog; he shines a light on a Jane Austen innovation; the pieces on Dostoevsky and Orwell are passionate and moving, and he is wonderful on Tolstoy. If you already value a particular author, he will give you additional cause and understanding to do so; if you don’t, he’ll give you something to make you cock your head and be glad you read that chapter anyway.
Wood himself loves, loves, LOVES adjectives, which endears him to me. A fifty-something headmaster as his boyhood school seems “fantastically antique” to his students, holding a burning-down match in his fingertips with “reptilian imperviousness.” The Goldberg versions are described thus: “The first aria is cocky, exuberant, optimistic, vital, fun, sound-filled; the second aria is reflective, seasoned, wintry, grieving, silence-haunted.” So, MFA pundits who decree you must get rid of your adjectives and adverbs, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Intelligent, challenging, varied – pick and choose, have some patience, and you will be rewarded, and sometimes bored. Still worth the trip.
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