Product Description

A collection of dazzling essays from one of the world's finest and most controversial literary critics. When James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999, the reviewers hailed a master critic. John Banville described Wood as a 'a close reader of genius...illuminating and exciting and compelling', and Malcolm Bradbury described him as 'a true critic: an urgent, impassioned reader of literature, a tireless interpreter, a live 'and learned intelligence'; Adam Begley, in the Financial Times, said that 'Wood is not just a keen critic, our best, but a superb writer'; in the Independent, Natasha Walter described The Broken Estate as 'a book that makes you feel, having closed it, as if your mind has been oxygenated'. The common thread in Wood's latest collection of essays is what makes us laugh - and the book is an attempt to distinguish between the perhaps rather limited English comedy (as seen in Waugh, for example) and a 'continental' tragic-comedy, which he sees as real, universal and quixotic. A particularly acerbic, and very funny, essay - which has been widely celebrated - deals with Zadie Smith, Rushdie, Pynchon and DeLillo; its title, 'Hysterical Realism', has already entered the phrasebook of literary language. With its brilliant studies of Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Naipaul, Pritchett and Bellow, The Irresponsible Self offers more exhilarating despatches from one of our finest living critics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #352801 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"'It is [Wood's] secure observation that makes these essays so engaging and ultimately puts this corrective missionary critic on the side of the secular angels.' Russell Celyn Jones, The Times 'In a literary world which is so often either relaxed into the flabby indifference of review-speak, or corseted into position with the strings and eyelets of critical jargon, James Wood's tone is invaluable.' Robert MacFarlane, Times Literary Supplement 'Wood is one of the finest critics at work today, heir to Coleridge, Hazlitt and V. S. Pritchett...He combines the breadth and seriousness of Edmund Wilson with the pellucid prose style of Cyril Connolly...Wood pursues his craft with a high seriousness the like of which we had not thought to see again after the death of Lionel Trilling.' John Banville, Irish Times"

Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph
'breathtakingly good...delightful and insightful'

Scotland on Sunday
'a delight to read...read this book and wonder'

Customer Reviews

The Highways and Byways of the Novel
James Wood's analyses of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are pungent and illuminating in this collection of essays, but even more interesting to me is his introduction of lesser-known novelists, such as Hrabel, JF Powers and Verga. THe IRRESPONSIBLE SELF also deals(at times with lofty disdain)with Tom Wolfe and Salmon Rushdie, and, more sympathetically, with Knut Hamsun, VS Pritchett, Saul Bellow, Monica Ali and Henry Green. And every one of the 20-odd essays has something illuminating to say about novels past and contemporary, the novel as a genre,and fictional links between the old and the new, the European and the American.

Here is a sample of Wood's slant on Saul Bellow: 'Bellow's bodies are funny; he is a great portraitist of the human form, Dickens's equal in the swift creation of instant gargoyles. There is not only Valentine Gersbach in HERZOG, but Victor Wulpy, the great art critic and theorist in 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?', who is dishevelled and 'wore his pants negligently', and Cousin Riva in 'Cousins': 'I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture.'

Such morsels wet the appetite for fictional delicacies as yet unsampled, or if already tasted those to be relished at a second sitting.