always love James Wood , thebook reviewer and perhaps the last of the Important Literary Critics of Our Era, but I absolutely love him when he reviews Tom Wolfe, as he does this week . I have to admit that I was excited to hear about the publication of Wolfe'sthis fall not so much for the novel itself, which I assumed would be dreck, but for Wood's inevitable lambasting of it.

And I was not disappointed, on either count. The review appeared online yesterday, and it starts with blistering pace right out of the gate:

Tom Wolfe writes Big and Tall Prose — big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability.

The review as a whole is a two-thousand-word "Aw, snap." When Wood was at the New Republic, he wrote one of the greatest book reviews ever on the subject of Wolfe's A Man in Full*, which contained many of the same criticisms that are contained in the review of Back to Blood. But I don't really care. I would happily buy a book that was nothing but James Wood ranting about how much he hates Tom Wolfe. Because his hatred for Wolfe reveals his best insights about the nature of fiction generally.

The important details, the ones that make fiction's intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up off the sidewalk. Tolstoy, praised as a realist by Tom Wolfe, took the germ of The Death of Ivan Ilyich from an actual story about a judge in a nearby town who had died of cancer; but one of the most beautiful moments in the novella surely came from Tolstoy's imagination — or, rather, from his patient loyalty to Ivan's invented reality. I mean the moment when Ivan Ilyich, lying on his couch, in great distress and loneliness, remembers "the raw and wrinkly French prunes of his childhood, their special taste, and how his mouth watered when he got down to the stone."

Wolfe brings out the best (or the worst) in Wood, because Wood's true gift is his eye for minute refinements of style in seemingly innocuous sentences, and Wolfe is incapable of producing that kind of literary pleasure. Which is why he relies on bullshit punctuation, bullshit vernacular, bullshit status symbols, bullshit racial and ethnic categories, and, perhaps most annoying of all, bullshit italics. Here is the opening of Back to Blood:

You...

You...

You... edit my life... You are my wife, my Mac the knifeMiami HeraldShehim

I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that 99.99 percent of the first paragraphs coming out of creative-writing departments today are better than Back to Blood's. Fuller. More considered. Less lazy. The thought contained in this paragraph could be culled, happily, into three words and left there. (Also, when you have to announce that you're making a witticism in the opening sentence of your novel, you probably shouldn't aim for witticism.)

Of course, you should read the whole of the review. Wood v. Wolfe is one of the great literary wrestling matches of the past twenty years, and like all these great struggles, the two enemies need each other to achieve greatness. Wood would not be Wood unless he had Wolfe to hate. His vision of literature is defined against Wolfe's theory and practice of the novel. And Wood's hatred actually gives Wolfe a certain gravitas he would not otherwise possess. Without Wood, Wolfe would just be a once-great writer declining into hackery. Being reviewed so acutely and viciously at least renders Wolfe worthy of hatred. Which, by this point, is mostly what he's good for.

*Correction: As a commenter noted, James Wood's essay on Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full can be read in his collection The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel.

PLUS: Read Esquire's Tom Wolfe Review in the November Issue, on Sale This Week

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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