Near the end of these twenty-plus essays, I flashed back to being in college in the early 1980s and discovering García Márquez, Borges, John Fowles, André Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick, and on and on. Amazing, fascinating, cutting-edge, avant-garde literature endures, and new writers and their works continue to fill an artistic, literary void. The Fun Stuff by James Wood is one place to fill that emptiness.
The Fun Stuff and Other Essays starts off a little offbeat, with an homage to Keith Moon’s early success, filled with “noise, speed, rebellion,” and his eventual decline. The rest of the essays are literary critiques of quality writers, their writing, or, most of the time, both. Wood delves deep, breaks things down, tears a few apart, and comes at each subject from every direction to decipher its meaning. His literary knowledge and scholarship are mind-numbing, and the complex connections he makes between varied works are astounding. You may also want a dictionary close by.
The subjects he chooses are, for the most part, extraordinary and challenging works of art, and at least a few should be on any literature lover’s Goodreads Read, Currently Reading, or Want to Read lists. Here are a few of the writers and books he devours:
W.G. Sebald’s “beautiful novel” Austerlitz, filled with real photographs set within a fictional story, and with the “rubble of history” and memory.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, an allegorical and tender novel that brings fantasy to the eerie, hollow day-to-day life of clones who become aware of their reason for existing.
See on AudioBooks (3 free books), Audible/Amazon, or BN.com.
Norman Rush’s three novels set in Botswana, particularly the masterful Mortals, with its fine, intricate plotting and its real understanding of a place and of a marriage falling apart.
The theological questions in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road.
The career of Edmund Wilson and the issues that affected the iconic journalist and critic’s judgment and writing.
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and its colonial metaphor in New York City, with the added bonus of the confused immigrant’s sense of becoming American and the roots of a rootless man.
V.S. Naipaul as the wonder and the wounded: a gritty tale of nastiness and personal demons that makes you squirm.
The fascinating examples from Robert Alter’s translation of the Bible, which is startling because we’re so used to the King James Version.
Marilynne Robinson and the deep divisions in a family where faith, pride, and perhaps fanatical stubbornness tear it apart.
Lydia Davis’s literature of lives whose habits hide a biting loneliness that they acutely understand and question.
Ian McEwan as a manipulative novelist.
The shallowness of Paul Auster.
George Orwell’s revolutionary mysticism, both contradictory and prescient. Orwell, like England in its victory over Hitler, succeeded through a winning combination of collectivism and individualism.
The magic realism of a mad-hatter Hungarian with a mad name: László Krasznahorkai.
Ismail Kadare, the Albanian writer whose world, built around his battle against communism, evaporated when communism fell.
A fascinating final essay about packing up his father-in-law’s library of four thousand books.
I particularly loved two essays. One was the Geoff Dyer piece, which made me immediately buy the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. The other was the Aleksandar Hemon essay, with the extraordinary fact that Hemon moved to the United States in 1992, learned to read and write in English, and became a master craftsman.
There were a few essays I trudged through, such as the one on Tolstoy, but that could be more about me. If you love Leo, you’ll probably be engrossed by the rich analysis.
Wood is, to say the least, passionate about books and writers. His dazzling critiques are here for you to examine, discover, and disagree with, and ultimately he opens countless doors to the wonderful, bottomless worlds of fiction and nonfiction. It’s a must-read for lovers of contemporary literature. The Fun Stuff and Other Essays by James Wood is fun stuff for lovers of comparative literature, which happens to be what I earned my B.A. in.
Find fun stuff on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You might like Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer as well as Boomerang: : Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis Review.
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