Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

One could put away all the criticism of James Woods approach to fiction, and still find the entire enterprise to be lacking.

 Ned Resnikoff tumbls at this well, so I’ll let him explain:

 Not only is this true, but think about how much fiction—and any form of art, really—would suck if it weren’t true. If there were really some kind of Platonic ideal of the perfect novel that all writers needed to aspire to, then the best fiction would be whatever got closest to that—and that fiction would all look pretty damn similar. As a consumer, I like having my variety. And as a writer, I like the fact that nothing is set in stone, and I get to discover and employ the kind of writing that moves me, and sets me apart from everyone else.

The slightly more cynical way of making this point is that, to echo Theodore Sturgeon, 90% of everything is crap. So that means if every young writer read The New Yorker or the London Review of Books and saw that James Wood liked his fiction a certain way, and sought to imitate that form, we would had have a bunch of crappy wannabe Chekhovs and Flauberts. Sure, some of these authors would produce great works, but most of them wouldn’t. So what we should have is as much experimentation as possible. There will always be a massive supply of people – smart, good people – writing fiction, and if critics can remain relatively open-minded about what type of fiction they enjoy or approve of, it may very well let these authors find their niches.

 Let’s imagine that, in Wood’s perfect world, everyone wrote like he would want them to. Let’s even imagine that DeLillo and Pynchon were so taken by Wood’s argument (since I’m a diehard hysterical realist, non-linear plotting isn’t a very big deal) that they decided to write like he wanted them to. Would we, the readers, be better of? Of course not! Since literary genius is a fleeting phen point pretty omenon, critics should be as open to it – in all possible forms. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a huge amount of overlap between, say, Thomas Pynchon and Henry James: they’re both fantastic writers! And their awesomeness is best expressed in the way that they see fit. To put it another way, I think we’ll remember Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, DeLillo, Pynchon and Wolfe much longer than we’ll remember Wood.