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"'It is [Wood's] secure observation that makes these essays so engaging and ultimately puts this corrective missionary critic on the side of the secular angels.' Russell Celyn Jones, The Times 'In a literary world which is so often either relaxed into the flabby indifference of review-speak, or corseted into position with the strings and eyelets of critical jargon, James Wood's tone is invaluable.' Robert MacFarlane, Times Literary Supplement 'Wood is one of the finest critics at work today, heir to Coleridge, Hazlitt and V. S. Pritchett...He combines the breadth and seriousness of Edmund Wilson with the pellucid prose style of Cyril Connolly...Wood pursues his craft with a high seriousness the like of which we had not thought to see again after the death of Lionel Trilling.' John Banville, Irish Times"
Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph
'breathtakingly good...delightful and insightful'
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
James Wood's analyses of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are pungent and illuminating in this collection of essays, but even more interesting to me is his introduction of lesser-known novelists, such as Hrabel, JF Powers and Verga. THe IRRESPONSIBLE SELF also deals(at times with lofty disdain)with Tom Wolfe and Salmon Rushdie, and, more sympathetically, with Knut Hamsun, VS Pritchett, Saul Bellow, Monica Ali and Henry Green. And every one of the 20-odd essays has something illuminating to say about novels past and contemporary, the novel as a genre,and fictional links between the old and the new, the European and the American.
Here is a sample of Wood's slant on Saul Bellow: 'Bellow's bodies are funny; he is a great portraitist of the human form, Dickens's equal in the swift creation of instant gargoyles. There is not only Valentine Gersbach in HERZOG, but Victor Wulpy, the great art critic and theorist in 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?', who is dishevelled and 'wore his pants negligently', and Cousin Riva in 'Cousins': 'I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture.'
Such morsels wet the appetite for fictional delicacies as yet unsampled, or if already tasted those to be relished at a second sitting.
Here is a sample of Wood's slant on Saul Bellow: 'Bellow's bodies are funny; he is a great portraitist of the human form, Dickens's equal in the swift creation of instant gargoyles. There is not only Valentine Gersbach in HERZOG, but Victor Wulpy, the great art critic and theorist in 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?', who is dishevelled and 'wore his pants negligently', and Cousin Riva in 'Cousins': 'I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture.'
Such morsels wet the appetite for fictional delicacies as yet unsampled, or if already tasted those to be relished at a second sitting.
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