More Wood Info

However flawed the article might be, however annoying it may be that it's James Wood once again getting the attention, let us pause for just a second to revel in how nice it is to see a major newspaper giving precious column-inches (and by now we should all know just how precious they are) to picking apart the peregrinations of a literary critic.

Good. Now then, what did Shea say? Well, actually, this article isn't so interesting for what Shea writes, but for the tiny peek at the pulse of the literary establishment vis a vis Wood that he's managed to uncover.

First:

"I think he just doesn't get America," says Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, invoking the argument that a messy, sprawling country demands comparable novels. With Englishmen now installed as prominent fiction critics at The New Yorker and The Atlantic (Christopher Hitchens), "It's like being in America in 1830, before Emerson arose. We still need to declare our independence."

Second:

John Leonard, a book critic at Harper's and television critic for New York magazine, said in an e-mail that while he's determined not to start an intramural sniping session among critics, given the market pressures hurting literary criticism as a whole, he is also "tempted to suggest that not appreciating either Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison suggests that maybe you are tone-deaf to the American language as she is written."

And third:

The decision by David Remnick, The New Yorker's editor, is a smart one, he thinks, but not without risks. "For every reader who is going to buy The New Yorker because Wood's essays appear in it," Schwarz says, "there will be some others who flip through it and alight on a paragraph of Wood's and think the magazine is too highbrow."

And lastly, this is disappointing:

At The New Yorker, Wood will now be writing shorter pieces, more often (though he will stretch out at times, too) -- a dozen a year.

I guess those meaty, TNR-style pieces are a little too difficult for those New Yorker readers.

Comments

[ed]

The New Republic had cut back its coverage in recent months and, according to TNR site, Wood had only written a handful of reviews in recent years.

http://www.tnr.com/showBio.mhtml?pid=20&sa=1

What I suspect will happen here is that, of the dozen articles cited, Wood will contribute many long-form pieces, perhaps with the latter being equal or greater than the four he wrote at TNR in 2007 or the seven he wrote at TNR in 2006. (But I likewise express concerns about Wood writing exclusively for the New Yorker and not for other places, thus skimping out his overall long-form review quantity year-round.)