The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays by James Wood (PDF)

Description

Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works—books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation—The Fun Stuff confirms Wood’s preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches—that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov—Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Aleksandar Hemon, and Michel Houellebecq. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming—which was a finalist for last year’s National Magazine Awards—as well as Wood’s essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Near the end of these twenty-plus essays I flashed back to being in college in the early 1980s and discovering Garcia Marquez, Borges, John Fowles, Andre Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick and on and on. Amazing, fascinating, cutting-edge, avant-garde literature endures with new writers and their works continue to fill an artistic literary void. This book is one place to fill that emptiness.The Fun Stuff starts off a little off-beat with a homage to Keith Moon’s early success filled with “noise, speed, rebellion” and his eventual decline. The rest of the essays are literary critiques of quality writers and their writing and most of the time both. Woods delves deep, breaks down, tears apart a few times, comes from all directions to decipher the meaning he derives from each subject. His literary knowledge and scholarship is mind numbing as he makes complex connections between varied works that is astounding. In addition, you may need to have a dictionary close by if you read this.And the subjects he chooses are, for the most part, extraordinary and challenging works of art and at least a few should be on any literature lover’s Goodreads read, currently-reading or want-to-read lists. Here are a few of the writers and books he devours.W.G. Sebald’s “beautiful novel” Austerliz, filled with real but fictional photographs and the “rubble of history” and memory.Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go, an allegorical and tender novel that brings fantasy to an eery and hollow day to day life of clones who become aware of their reason for existing.Norman Rush’s three novels set in Botswana, particularly the masterful Mortals, and its fine intricate plotting and real sense of understanding a place and a marriage falling apart.The theological questions in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road.The career of Edmund Wilson and the issues that affected the iconic journalist and critic’s judgement and writing.Joseph O’Neill’s Netherlands and its colonial and colonist metaphor in New York City with the added bonus of the confused immigrant’s sense of becoming American as well as the roots of a rootless man.V.S Naipaul as the wonder and the wounded. A gritty tale of nastiness and personal demons that make you squirm.The fascinating examples of Robert Alter’s translation of the Bible that is startling because we’re so used to the King James version.Marilynne Robision and the the deep division’s in a family where faith and pride and perhaps fanatical stubbornness rips a family apart.Lydia Davis’s literature of lives whose habits hide a biting loneliness that they acutely understand and question.Ian McEwan as a manipulative novelist.The shallowness of Paul Auster.And, he rambled on finally getting to George Orwell’s revolutionary mysticism as both contradictory and prescient. Orwell’s as well as England’s victory over Hitler was due to their winning combination of collectivity and individualism.The magic realism of a mad-hatter Hungarian with a mad name: Laszlo Krasznahorkai.Ismail Kadare, an Albanian, whose world, revolving around his battle against communism falling, evaporated when it did.A fascinating final essay about packing up his father-in-law’s library of four thousand books.I particularly loved two essays: the Geoff Dyer piece that made me immediately purchase the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and the Alekzandar Hemon section and the extraordinary fact that he not only moved to the United States in 1992 and learned to read and write in English, but he became a master craftsman.There were a few essays that I trudged through, e.g., Tolstoy, but that could be more about me. If you love Leo, you’ll probably be engrossed in the rich analysis.Woods is, to say the least, passionate about books and writers. His dazzling critiques are here for you to examine and discover and disagree, but ultimately he opens countless doors to the wonderful and bottomless worlds of fiction and nonfiction. A must read for lovers of contemporary literature.

⭐The book is full of excellent essays about novels and novelists. One of the major critics of today.

⭐His books will get you seeing literature in a new light. Worth your time! I’ve read them all. Seek them all out.

⭐James Wood is a mentor for me. Good nourishing stuff as well as fun…

⭐As with all of Wood’s books, ‘Fun Stuff’ was insightful and thought-provoking. An incredible book

⭐thanks

⭐from wood we learn that edmund wilson did not like critics and other writers who quoted lines and passages from literary works. reading wood, we come close to an encyclopedic consciousness unearthing quote after quote by numerous authors from his internal literary garden and displaying them before us like an assorted of unexpected red mushrooms.in an essay, in her collection, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and other Literary Essays, about the sad state of real literary criticism in the 21st century, cynthia ozick, taking a moment to praise wood as one of the saviors, in as much as the practice can be saved, scolded those of us who toil in the fields of amazon as commenters not unlike a bunch of barefoot infants sloshing about with buckets of water in mud and calling it gardening, or what she referred to as ‘a fetid sea’. in her fetid sea, sited by her is the occasional ‘artful golden minnow’. i count myself as one in that school.speaking of book reviewers, the ones for hire, ms ozick described: ‘What separates reviewing from criticism—intrinsically—is that the critic must summon what the reviewer cannot: horizonless freedoms, multiple histories, multiple libraries, multiple metaphysics and intuitions.’as a fan of the novels of ian mcewan. i have read and posted reviews of several of his books here on amazon. i have found in them the central theme of innocence, of which i have briefly commented from review to review. cynthia ozick is right, i lacked the space of the critic to range as far as wood did, finding in mcewan’s writing trauma which, for wood, led to innocence and from there grew into something splendid, manipulative secrecy. had i claimed the critic’s space, i doubt i would have subsumed innocence to trauma to gaze at it from the perspective of what mr wood labeled manipulative secrecy. but when i see that wood has taken the space and time to do this, i feel a sense of awe, and gratitude, at his mastery. this is not to say that i am always in agreement with his findings.i shake my head at the number of pages spent by him dismissing the talent of paul auster and missing the importance of nostalgia in auster’s work. and i admire him for reading edmund wilson’s books, a couple of them so boring that even wilson’s critical skills could not keep the hardiest of readers from falling asleep. wood returns again and again to thomas bernhard, finding his influential stamp on many east european writers, so as a fan of bernhard, i make a list of the authors mentioned by wood i haven’t read.before writing this review, i read several articles about wood and his critical work in several publications. several critics of his work focused on his critiques of the novels by zadie smith, of her style of writing which he is credited with coining the term ‘hysterical realism’. the publications that printed the articles seemed to have in common a hefty comment section written by contributors who generally are literary savvy, golden minnows in another sea.that as a literary critic, wood can engage the literary reader and writer is what makes him fun reading for those of us who find this fun stuff.

⭐The Fun Stuff is a magnificent collection of essays. James Wood has always divided opinion, and it is mostly a question of seriousness. Some think he is too harsh and unduly damning in his verdicts, while others find his reviews laughably self-involved. This new selection, though, retrieved from The New Yorker, The New Republic, and London Review of Books, is a marvel. Wood is fair and funny, discerning and serious, the metaphorical excesses of his first two volumes shorn into a newly refined precision.Two largely personal essays bookend the present collection, the literary criticism sandwiched in between. The first is a superb article on Keith Moon, in which the supposedly icy Wood melts with schoolboy excitement. The second, a more sombre affair, recalls the author clearing his deceased father-in-law’s library and pondering the uselessness of bequeathing a mass of books posterity doesn’t want. He posits the idea that a library doesn’t reflect the mind of its owner, and, if anything, only acts as an obstacle to understanding them.The range of the criticism is remarkable, and it seems Wood has read nearly everything. Few critics have his powers of disassembly, his zest for noticing the tiniest of details, and although he cunningly expose a text’s structural minutiae, right down to the grammar, he also tackles its thematic contents (a perceptive review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland repositions and illuminates that novel in a postcolonial light). Such an expansive and sophisticated approach is rare, and Wood cleverly synthesises the biographical and the aesthetic, the generalised and the particular, in a unique and sparkling prose.The only small gripe is that, during the essays on writers as diverse as Mikhail Lermontov and Ben Lerner, Ian McEwan and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Wood will use the same example to highlight a writer’s use of, say, defamiliarisation or free indirect speech. Although this is to be expected in a collection that skims over the last seven years, some new examples would have been useful, as the constant retreat into the samey safe havens of Flaubert and Tolstoy shows a touch of unwanted, and easily rectified, repetition.It is apparent, however, that Wood has finally matured, and it is this that makes the book such a confident and nuanced delight, for he is no longer the pugnacious critic delivering cheap and easy punches: he fights fair.

⭐“ The Fun Stuff” (2012) is a collection of James Woods essays. In 2019 he brought out “ Serious Noticing”, a much larger collection of essays that includes nine pieces from the earlier book. “ Serious Noticing” is an outstanding work with fine, thoughtful essays on some of the well known great works of literature – “ Don Quixote “, “ Moby Dick”, “ Anna Karenina “, “ The Brothers Karamazov” – as well as essays on interesting, lesser known recent writers – Bohumil Hrabal, Lazlo Krasznahorkai, W.G.Sebald, Marilynne Robinson.His earlier collection of essays – “ The Fun Stuff “ – has little to match the scope and depth of the later work.

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