  Category: Fiction I've been trying to get through James Wood's new book of criticism, urlLink The Irresponsible Self , but have to admit it's pretty boring so far, despite Wood's brilliant writing and occasionally great insights. I think Laura Miller makes a lot of good points in her urlLink article for Salon today about why Wood's new book might be unsatisfying (to me), and what in general is disappointing about many of today's most brilliant book critics (I'm beginning to think Miller is as brilliant as any of them). Summarizing the similar arguments of new books by Wood and fellow New Republic critic Dale Peck, Miller writes the following: "[Wood and Peck agree] the maximalist novel is too long and too digressive, and it is about ideas not people.
(One difference is that Peck thinks this is elitist, while Wood thinks it's not rarefied enough. ) If you disagree (and in many, if not all, instances, I do), you hit a wall. 'Infinite Jest,' 'The Corrections' and 'White Teeth' are in fact ripe with humanity, and their digressions and disquisitions are not tiresome but delightful. So there. It is a silly impasse, the one where taste cannot be accounted for and the sides resort to hurling insults. " The point Miller makes throughout the article is basically that Peck and Wood (Harold Bloom could be added to this group) dismiss contemporary literature (the "maximalist novel") without considering the very real differences that exist between different contemporary authors and contemporary novels. The group of Moody, Wallace, Eugenides, Eggers, Julavitz, Ford, Rushdie, Whitehead, Delillo, Zadie Smith, Pynchon et al, is far from monolithic (in many ways many of these writers aren't even similar to each other), but the greatest critics of our time treat them as if they were (Bloom likes some of the older ones like Pynchon, as a rare exception). The real problem with this is it leads to paralysis in criticism--surely, those who applaud the shallow twists and turns of what Wood calls "hysterical realism" are not helping matters either.
The point is, criticism requires wading into individual works and making distinctions--the denunciation of everything since Virginia Woolf as garbage (Peck) or saying contemporary novels don't know anything about "reality" (Wood) may be a matter for broad literay historians, but such overarching theories are very dangerous for critics to hold. Each new work then becomes either proof or an exception to their teleological theories--the feeling I got reading Wood's new book was that I would not be surprised by any of his judgments.
As Miller points out, Wood's and Peck's system of criticism is very coherent, but also very dead. Just for the record, I still think Wood is the best critic out there today, and I agree with 90% of what he has to say about all literature before the last twenty years. Check out Robert Birnbaum's urlLink interview with Wood here . 
