The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

I see The New York Times is picking the 100 best books of the 21st century. Readers are invited to submit their own top ten choices. Here’s what I submitted:

Trawler (2005)

Redmond O’Hanlon

Travels in Siberia (2010)

Ian Frazier

Cross Country (2006)

Robert Sullivan

I Curse the River of Time (2010)

Per Petterson

Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011)

Janet Malcolm

The Sight of Death (2006)

T. J. Clark

Uncommon Carriers (2006)

John McPhee

A Terrible Country (2018)

Keith Gessen

The Old Ways (2012)

Robert Macfarlane

The Ongoing Moment (2005)

Geoff Dyer

It pains me to leave out James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, and Helen Vendler – three of my favorite writers. But when you draw up these lists, sometimes you have to be ruthless. 

Kevin Barry's "Night Boat to Tangier"

Not often do I post about novels. That’s because I’m generally not a fan. There’ve been exceptions. Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time comes to mind. Now there’s another – Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier. I recognize a brilliant stylist when I see one. Barry is the real deal. Samples:

The years are rolling out like tide now.

His aura is of brassy menace.

I fucken hate ignorance, he says.

From the glare of the arclights, the lingering of pollutants and the refraction of heat left by the late October sun, the air is thick and smoky, and it makes the night glow a vivid thing, and dense.

An attack dog barks a yard of stars.

They exchange a dry look.

The bar awaits grimly beneath the glare of its strip lights. It runs the thread of its voices.

The head waiter looked like a ’tacheless Salvador Dali and drank a ball of coñac and was sustained.

The city ran a swarm of fast anchovy faces.

The hours were heavy and cumbersome and moved by like old horses.

The barman drooped a heavy eye over the football pages. He had the look of a long shift off him.

A dead hotel was chained up, its windows blind.

That’s enough to give you a taste. Oh yes, and this beauty:

He drank Powers whiskey from a naggin clamped between his thighs and slowed for the bends that he knew by touch.

What’s it about? Drugs, sex, violence. Need I say more? Just finished chapter eight, “The Judas Iscariot All-Night Drinking Club.” What an extraordinary piece of writing! Haven’t read anything like it since the knife fight in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. Barry’s style crosses McCarthy on Tarantino. Beware! Fucken addictive. 

Postscript: The New Yorker recently ran a terrific Kevin Barry short story – “The Pub with No Beer.” That’s where I first encountered him.

George Steiner's Draconian Ban

James Wood (Illustration by Mark Ulriksen)

One of the most wrongheaded ideas I’ve ever read is George Steiner’s proposition that literary criticism should be banned. In his Real Presences (1989), he imagined a “counter-Platonic republic from which the reviewer and the critic have been banished; a republic for writers and readers.” He viewed criticism to be “secondary and parasitic.” In his republic,

There would be no journals of literary criticism; no academic seminars, lectures or colloquies on this or that poet, playwright, novelist; no “James Joyce quarterlies” or “Faulkner newsletters”; no interpretations of, no essays of opinion on, sensibility in Keats or robustness in Fielding.

To which the only possible response is “Oy!”

“Response” is the key here. What is the point of creating art if we aren’t allowed to express our own response to it? Adam Kirsch, in the Preface to his Rocket and Lightship (2015), says, “For criticism, too, is a kind of literature: the critic expresses his own sense of life through his responses to other minds and sensibilities.” Exactly. John Updike, in his review of Wright Morris’s On Fiction, called Morris “a responder to writing” (“Wright on Writing,” Hugging the Shore, 1983) – a wonderful description that applies to all great critics.

Here, for example, is James Wood responding to the writing in Per Petterson’s novel I Curse the River of Time:

In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the “bitter gift of pain” mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the “bitter gift” of the funeral.

How many people think like this? Probably as many as think like Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Ramsay or one of David Foster Wallace’s characters. Petterson is remarkably gifted at capturing not so much randomness or irrelevance (habitual catchments of the stream of consciousness) as the staggered distances of memory: one detail seems near at hand, while another can be seen only cloudily; one mental picture seems small, while another seems portentous. Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial. Petterson’s interest is pictorial and spatial rather than logical and interrogative. His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague. Yet Petterson is novelistically acute about human motive and self-deception. In both passages, our needy, self-involved narrator hovers over his memories, and finally pokes his way back into the narrative with local assertions of self: “and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi”; “which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago.” [“Late and Soon,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2012]

Those two splendid paragraphs convinced me to read Petterson’s novel. Today, I count it among my favorite books. Without Wood’s piece, I doubt I would’ve found it. Is that not one of the great benefits of reviews and critical pieces? They lead us to discovery of new works. They help us see in fresh ways. They add meaning to our reading experience. They enhance our enjoyment of life.

A republic in which literary criticism is banned is not a place I'd want to live.  

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. 

James Ley On James Wood

James Ley, in his absorbing The Critic in the Modern World (2014), says of James Wood’s criticism, “His characteristic approach is to interpret a fictional work via an assessment of the author’s stylistic proclivities: his point of entry, the basis of his understanding, is the weave and texture of a writer’s prose.” This is well said. It gets at the quality that most draws me to Wood’s writing – his detailed analysis of what makes great writing great. It reminds me of what Helen Vendler said about Seamus Heaney’s critical writing: “The art of Heaney’s criticism is never to lose touch with the writing act” (“A Wounded Man Falling Toward Me,” The New Yorker, March 13, 1989). It’s Wood’s art, too. For example, in his superb "Late and Soon" (The New Yorker, December 12, 2012), a review of Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time, he quotes a couple of excerpts from the novel and says,

In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the “bitter gift of pain” mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the “bitter gift” of the funeral.

I relish this kind of stylistic analysis. Wood provides it in almost every piece he writes. I wish Ley had devoted more of his study to consideration of Wood’s aesthetics. But, unlike Wood, Ley isn’t an aesthetic critic. His approach is metaphysical. He’s interested in Wood’s ideas – hysterical realism, fictionality, lifeness, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It illuminates Wood’s thinking. But it neglects an essential point: Wood’s strongest thought is in his style, the way he expresses himself. Ley knows this. At one point, he says, “The metaphysics of each critic is reflected in the texture of his writing.” Exactly. Ley’s study would’ve been much richer if he'd focused on examining “the weave and texture” of Wood’s splendid prose.

December 10, 2012 Issue

What does James Wood mean by “curling”? One thing for sure, he’s not talking about brooms and rocks. In his splendid “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” (The Irresponsible Self, 2004), he writes, “We delight in the curling process of invention whereby seemingly incompatible elements – eyebrows and caterpillars and Eden; or women’s knees and carjacks – are combined.” And in his “Late and Soon,” a wonderful review of Per Petterson’s novels, in this week’s New Yorker, he refers to Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time as “that mysterious book with its curling form and drifting sentences.” Curling process, curling form - I picture a tangle of Virginia creeper. Wood admires “serpentine” sentences (“‘Reality Examined to the Point of Madness’: Laszlo Krasznahorkai”), “bending” chapters (“W. G. Sebald’s Uncertainty”), and “writhing” music (“The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon”). In his Krasznahorkai piece, he adverts to the way that the mind of the protagonist of War and War “stretches and then turns back on itself, like a lunatic scorpion trying to sting itself.” In “Late and Soon,” he provides at least two more aspects of his “curling” aesthetic: (1) consciousness’s free-associative motion (“Note, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the ‘bitter gift of pain’ mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the ‘bitter gift’ of the funeral”; (2) what he calls “the staggered distances of memory” (“Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial”). “Late and Soon” is a fascinating elaboration of Wood’s concept of “curling form.” It’s also one of this year's best “Critic At Large” pieces.