Notes on Becca Rothfeld's "The Joy of Text"

Notes on Becca Rothfeld’s “The Joy of Text” (Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2020), an effusive review of James Wood’s new essay collection Serious Noticing:

1. Rothfeld says that of the twenty-eight pieces included in Serious Noticing, “only two are negative” – "Paul Auster’s Shallowness” and “Hysterical Realism.” I think there’s a third: “George Orwell’s Very English Revolution,” in which Wood calls Orwell a “puritan masochist,” suggests that he “heightened” passages in his memoir Down and Out in Paris, and argues that Orwell’s socialism had Fascist roots. (See my “James Wood’s Vile ‘George Orwell’s Very English Revolution.’ ”)

2. Rothfeld says that Serious Noticing’s Introduction is new. This isn’t entirely true. Part of it is new, and part of it is from Wood’s “Using Everything,” included in his 2015 collection The Nearest Thing to Life.

3. My appreciation of Wood differs radically from Rothfeld’s. She says his writing is “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” Those are just about the last words I’d use to describe his work. To me, Wood is a thinker, not a feeler. He’s at his best when he’s dissecting a piece of writing, showing how it works. His most inspired sentences aren’t lush; they’re glittering combines of observation and quotation (e.g., “How strange and original that ‘clutching itself’ is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shriveling”).

4. Rothfeld describes Wood’s Melville piece as “exquisite” – “perhaps the best in Serious Noticing.” I found it the least interesting – too much blather about God (e.g., “The difficulty is that, if we really did live in the world according to God’s time, we would be thought mad: for this is just what Jesus did”; “Language breaks up God, releases us from the one meaning of the predestinating God, but merely makes that God differently inscrutable by flooding Him with thousands of different meanings”). 

5. My favorite Wood essay is one he’s never collected – “Late and Soon” (The New Yorker, December 10, 2012), a review of Per Petterson’s novels. Wood’s extensive quotations from Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time and his fascinating analyses of those quotations persuaded me to seek this book out and read it. This is something I rarely do; I’m not a fan of fiction. I found I Curse the River of Time so good, I read it twice, savoring its “curling form and drifting sentences” (Wood’s words). I count it among my favorite books.