The war for the soul of literature - Salon

The war for the soul of literature - Salon: "The hysterical realist novel, Wood insists, is a noisy 'perpetual-motion machine' engaged in 'the pursuit of vitality at all costs.' Its authors produce 'books of great self-consciousness with no selves in them; curiously arrested books which know a thousand different things -- How to make the best Indonesian fish curry! The sonics of the trombone! The drug market of Detroit! The history of strip cartoons! -- but do not know a single human being.'

Without a doubt, some contemporary novels are overly frenetic and data-stuffed. But Wood doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between the frankly bad specimens ( Salman Rushdie's 'Fury,' a book that, contrary to Wood's predictions, was widely panned) and those that enjoyably gratify readers' curiosity about things like the drug trade in Detroit (why not?). They all strike him as inhuman because he has no interest in their struggle to describe what it feels like to live in a jittery world where authenticity has disappeared in a maze of electronic screens, and people often feel that the freedom to choose between multiple identities leaves them unsure whether any of those identities can be real. Wood is a great champion of the real in fiction, and particularly of characters who believe so entirely in their own reality that they convince the reader of it too."