Review by Choice Review
Many of the 23 essays in this book deal with "a kind of tragicomic stoicism which might be called the comedy of forgiveness ... [which] can be distinguished--if a little roughly--from the comedy of correction." Focusing on the secular and modern novel--and on laughter in particular--Wood (one-time literary critic at The Guardian and now senior editor of The New Republic) incorporates discussion of the novel's origins, techniques, and development and provides an approach and critical tools to make the reader a better and more complete consumer of fiction. Wood begins with essays on Cervantes and Shakespeare and goes on to discuss the work of such writers as Isaac Babel, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Salman Rushdie, and Saul Bellow. He describes the authors' lives and provides critical details and interpretations of their work in a lively and engaging style. The result is a book replete with interesting insights, for example that Shakespeare developed "what might be called rambling consciousness." ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. W. B. Warde Jr. University of North Texas
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Literary critic Wood doesn't simply assemble collections of random writings but rather follows a line of inquiry in a series of essays that then forms an intellectually exhilarating whole. In The Broken Estate (1999), he wrote about how art came to be viewed as sacred. Here, Wood, a class act on the mastheads of both the Guardian and the New Republic, considers comedy in literature, particularly the emergence of a new form of humor engendered by the psychological depth of the modern novel, a kind of tragicomic stoicism which might best be called a comedy of forgiveness. This coalesced along with the unreliably unreliable narrator, a key figure Wood traces back to Shakespeare, whose transformation of the soliloquy, Wood avers, made possible the first streams of consciousness. Wood then writes with exquisite sensitivity and stirring acuity about two dozen diverse writers, including Coleridge, Tolstoy, Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bellow, Coetzee, Rushdie, Franzen, and Monica Ali, in sterling essays as voluptuous in style as they are clarion in thought. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Still writing with magisterial sweep and terrific intensity, Wood (The Book Against God) in this newest collection of review-essays celebrates the indeterminate voice of comic narrative, which "replaces the knowable with the unknowable, transparency with unreliability," enabling the reader's sympathies without directing them. This voice aids the development of secular modernity, part of a "comedy of forgiveness" in which morality, no longer the voice of divine law, itself partakes of the foibles and variances of human temperament. Starting inevitably with Shakespeare and Cervantes, Wood offers up assessments of individual (male) writers who in one way or another exemplify Wood's principle, including Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Joseph Roth, Henry Green, Bellow. Oddly juxtaposed with this late 19th- to mid-20th-century sequence is a group of rather bilious reviews of a more recent generation of fiction, which Wood never deigns to call postmodern. His tone ranging from respectful reservation (about J.M. Coetzee) to outright contempt (for Tom Wolfe), Wood hammers vigilantly at the failure of intellectual, cultural and political motives to make good fiction. Unlike American culture-warriors, Wood takes his sharp ear and deep convictions straight to the work itself, carefully explaining the structural, formal and tonal weaknesses of what he calls "hysterical realism," revealing his distaste for journalism and pop culture but never advancing it. Most compelling is the way his own style swells and contracts with his subject matter, blithely metaphorical in praising Bellow, earnest and lucid in sorting out Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith, sarcastic in attacking Rushdie. Still, meaner spirits will await Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs, also due in June. Agent, The Wiley Agency. (June 16) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A theory of distinctively "modern" comedy is and isn't consistently addressed in this provocative gathering of 21 recent (1999-2003) reviews by the stylish critic (The Broken Estate, 1999, etc.) and novelist (The Book Against God, 2003, etc.). A closely reasoned introductory essay contrasts the corrective emphases of classical satire and invective with a "comedy of forgiveness" that acknowledges, indeed esteems human frailty and folly. Wood locates the roots of such comedy in displays of "random consciousness" in Shakespearean soliloquies, and in the wise tolerance of exemplars like Cervantes, Erasmus, and Austen. This idea is developed with impressive variety and nuance in analyses of the irrational mood swings of Dostoevsky's posturing characters, Isaac Babel's "rhythmic discontinuity," and Saltykov-Schedrin's horrifically funny anatomy of hypocrisy in his underrated masterpiece The Golovlyov Family. One wants to applaud Wood's endorsements of such brilliant little-read writers as the Sicilian Chekhov Giovanni Verga, the Austro-Hungarian Empire's mordant "elegist" Joseph Roth, and the enormously reader-friendly Czech comic novelist Bohumil Hrabal. Equally incisive looks at contemporaries include a stringent criticism of the Dickens-inspired "hysterical realism" that suffuses ambitious overstuffed fictions by Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Salman Rushdie (though this generally negative essay does include an admirably evenhanded assessment of Zadie Smith's much-admired White Teeth). But a review of J.M. Coetzee's unsparingly judgmental (and splendid) novel Disgrace doesn't seem to belong here--and one wonders why space was wasted reprinting understandably dismissive analyses of Tom Wolfe's clunky A Man in Full and Rushdie's tedious, meretricious Fury. Focus is recovered with considerations of the inspiration for V.S. Naipaul's immortal Mr. Biswas (the author's appealing father Seepersad), V.S. Pritchett's "Russianized" English comedy, and Henry Green's aslant, quietly anarchic character studies. And Wood's admiring, admirably detailed tribute to "Saul Bellow's Comic Style" is, as they say, worth the price of admission. A miscellany, then--and an unusually rich and satisfying one. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
