Provocative, sometimes sermonizing literary criticism, from a writer ready to take on Sir Thomas More, Philip Roth, George Steiner, Iris Murdoch, and others. In these essays and book reviews, some written for the New Republic and the New Yorker, Wood charts an aesthetic and philosophical path—with many theological detours—across literature from Jane Austen’s quiet narrative innovations and Flaubert’s stylistic legacy through Chekhov’s sense of reality, Thomas Pynchon’s allegorical set pieces in Mason & Dixon, and Don DeLillo’s paranoid history in Underworld. His “What Chekhov Meant by Life,” by far the collection’s best piece, adeptly shows how Chekhov learned to build stories out of nearly arbitrary human details that other writers, aspiring to godlike omniscience, still miss. His interest in realism notwithstanding, Wood fixes his critical lodestar in the 19th century, when “the Gospels began to be read, by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales [and] fiction became an almost religious activity.” His thesis that “the novel . . . having found the religion of itself, relaxed too gently into aestheticism,” however, frequently muddies the religious and aesthetic impulses. In going after the White Whale of Melville’s prose in Moby-Dick, for instance, Wood converts Melville’s tortuous religious rejection into an obscure “atheism of metaphor” in which Melville pursued the Godhead in a richly, obsessively metaphorical language. Wood’s muddled discussion of the extent of T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism in the face of Anthony Julius’s polemical T.S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form gets lost between the poet’s reactionary cultural agenda and his High Church theology, without addressing his deep prejudice’s personal side. The last piece in the volume clarifies Wood’s perspective, ironically, in a sermon about his own Low Church childhood, present atheism, and Matthew Arnold’s melioratively reasonable Christianity. Near-evangelical about narrative, Wood’s literary appraisals have the thoroughness of biblical exegesis, whether on the novels of Knut Hamsun or Thomas Mann.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50217-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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