What is the importance of literary criticism?

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

Here is a terrific review of The Road from the New Republic.

http://www.powells.com/review/2007_05_17.html

Wood reprises the great post-apolcalypse novels and seems to proclaim this one his favorite. He's not been totally sold on McCarthy but in this review he seems to grudgingly acknowledge his brilliance.

I can't believe I read that entire review. Preening moron. When you get to the last paragraph were Wood calls the novel "magnificent", you are somewhat taken back.

Yet the end of the world is more than a personal matter; and what this magnificent novel gains in human interest it loses by being personal at the moment when it should be theological. In this way it evades the demands, the obligations, of its subject. The question of endings in an apocalypse must be philosophical as well as merely emotional, even in a novel. Will it be heaven or hell? Will it last forever, or be over in a flash?

This is the fancy way of saying, just like Oprah's fans surely did, HOW DOES IT END????

Fail.

[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

I can't believe I read that entire review. Preening moron. When you get to the last paragraph were Wood calls the novel "magnificent", you are somewhat taken back.



This is the fancy way of saying, just like Oprah's fans surely did, HOW DOES IT END????

Fail.

I think you're still sore at Wood for talking about Joseph Smith's fraudulence, especially the offhanded way he did it, like everyone knows this.

I think what he's saying in your quote is that McCarthy copped out by giving their journey some personal redemption, a glimmer of a hollywood ending to apeal to the Oprah types. He suggests that McCarthy should have killed father and son off and ended with a fourish of poetic abstraction sort of like he did in Blood Meridian and Cities of the Plain. I'm not saying I agree with him.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

I think you're still sore at Wood for talking about Joseph Smith's fraudulence, especially the offhanded way he did it, like everyone knows this.

I think what he's saying there is that McCarthy copped out by giving their journey some personal redemption, a glimmer of a hollywood ending to apeal to the Oprah types. He suggests that McCarthy should have killed father and son off and ended with a fourish of poetic abstract sort of like he did in Blood Meridian and Cities of the Plain.

Screw Wood.

First off, I have no memory of a connection between Wood and Joseph Smith.

Second, for him to have the gall to tell McCarthy how he SHOULD have ended the book, is like saying, if I were DaVinci, I would have touched up the corner of her mouth a bit with some rouge. Screw him. Or, I would like Mt. Everest better, if the peak was more symmetrical. WTF?

Honestly, like Oprah readers, Wood has overthought the ending, trying to interpret it. Do you know what that means? He doesn't get it.

I'm very disappointed, if this is the greatest literary critic of the last 40 odd years or so, and this is all he has to say. What a pile of doo-doo.

You are going to get a lot of credit from a lot of people, if you have read the 200,000 previous important posts, and can formulate your response in the context of them, as well as the thousands of other conversations of other works. I will grant that someone like Wood is infinitely more capable of doing this--of placing this book in the context of other books and conversations.

But in the sense of taking this work, and examining it in terms of the human experience, in and by itself, he fails.

If this book is truly important, this review is not among those reviews that will be remembered as important.

[SeattleUte]

Or maybe just killed the son off and ended with the father, the last man, raging at Jehova in some fashion.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

Or maybe just killed the son off and ended with the father, the last man, raging at Jehova in some fashion.

yes pounding his fists in the ashes.

or how about being roasted alive on a spit.

blah, blah, blah.

What if this, what if that.

Are we going to rewrite Frost's poetry next?

I don't know if I've ever read a book, that was so technically adept and also so free of artifice.

If you want to make the argument that the ending was artifice, that they were false steps, then make that argument. But I feel pretty safe saying that the argument will not hold. The work speaks for itself.

[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

I will grant that someone like Wood is infinitely more capable of doing this--of placing this book in the context of other books and conversations.

But in the sense of taking this work, and examining it in terms of the human experience, in and by itself, he fails.

This is an interesting distinction.

Wood calls himself an atheist nostalgic for belief. He was raised in a fundamentalist protestant household.

He has said he is not a fan of American male writers (Wood is English) who have opaque, taciturn male heros. He cites Hemingway as the chief offender, but has noted this in McCarthy's writing as well.

McCarthy has said that he can't take a novel seriously that doesn't deal with the problem of death. That a novel absent death is not worthy of consideration. I don't think he and Wood share a common vision of what makes a great novel but Wood does grudgingly call him a brilliant novelist at times. (Wood's wife is a well known novelist and I don't think her novels tackle death; they deal with New York high society.) Wood hated no Country For Old Men. Here's his review of it along with reprisal of McCarthy's career in a New Yorker article. Clearly there's huge admiration mixed with some annoyance here.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...0725crbo_books

I too was a little surprised the first time I read the review of The Road when right at the end he called it a "magnificent novel." Wood, by the way, is hard on most everyone he reviews to some extent.

[MikeWaters]

Ok, now you are asking me to appreciate an effete English literary critic who doesn't like HEMINGWAY!!!!!!

How can someone not like Hemingway? That's the end of the conversation right there.

[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

yes pounding his fists in the ashes.

or how about being roasted alive on a spit.

blah, blah, blah.

What if this, what if that.

Are we going to rewrite Frost's poetry next?

I don't know if I've ever read a book, that was so technically adept and also so free of artifice.

If you want to make the argument that the ending was artifice, that they were false steps, then make that argument. But I feel pretty safe saying that the argument will not hold. The work speaks for itself.

I loved The Road. I have no complaints. I've read all of McCarthy's southwesterns and The Road at least once. I need to read the less well known earlier fiction set in the Deep South. I've got them all. Have you read any of those?

[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

Ok, now you are asking me to appreciate an effete English literary critic who doesn't like HEMINGWAY!!!!!!

How can someone not like Hemingway? That's the end of the conversation right there.

I don't think he dislikes Hemingway. Just this one way in which he's often imitated. I think he sees it as an easy way out.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by SeattleUte

I loved The Road. I have no complaints. I've read all of McCarthy's southwesterns and The Road at least once. I need to read the less well known earlier fiction set in the Deep South. I've got them all. Have you read any of those?

All I have read is "Horses" which I thought was good to very good, but nothing to jump up and down about. The second book of the trilogy, I have said before, I couldn't finish. His temptation to wax philosophical at the expense of bringing the reader with him, got the best of him, and I could not continue on that journey.