It has also motivated some of Wood’s most withering snark: “It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book,” begins one review. But Updike is, so to speak, another story Wood’s opposition to Updike and to the sort of hollow aestheticism that Updike’s prose represents has been a touchstone of his reviewing. It is truly Wood’s best performance, and if nothing else succeeds in demonstrating that he missed his true calling (and an honest living) as a back-up studio percussionist for radio promotions and so forth.īefore HFW, Wood had never spilled much ink on DFW, typically lumping him into amalgams with the other usual suspects of so-called “hysterical realism” when castigating this or that imagined infraction of literary good breeding. Therefore he or his publicist released a home video of the reviewer doing a little kitchen-table finger-drumming routine, in which he gives evidence of the speed he had needed to type his way so swiftly to the top of his profession as well as the flexibility he developed doing so much of that typing for Marty Peretz. In the wake of further high-profile negative reviews of How Fiction Works and other assaults on his critical reputation, however, Wood felt the need for an additional public relations move to “humanize” his image or at least make people feel sorry for him and lay off a little. To round things out, Wood also used the occasion to respond to a negative review of HFW by dishonestly misrepresenting what the reviewer had said. With the DFW eulogy, Wood was doing a bit of damage-control, since in his own recently-released etiquette manual, How Fiction Works, he had derided the future suicide’s fiction as, among other things, “the whole of boredom.” Thus Wood felt it necessary to assure us of his great respect for Wallace as a writer and of how much he had looked forward to each of his books, especially since Wallace had been showing promising signs of “maturing,” i.e., becoming more like James Wood. ![]() Given the incredibly narcissistic and self-serving eulogy that James Wood came out with on the occasion of David Foster Wallace’s death, we can only imagine what kind of wreath he’ll show up with, uninvited, to lay on the tomb of John Updike.
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