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March 29, 2004
OGIC: On the fly
Still crazy-busy over here, but I wanted to throw out this tidbit from James Wood's latest New Republic review, a polite but firm taking-apart of John Le Carré's latest--and, somewhat more mildly, of the writer's long-standing reputation as a literary talent who transcends his chosen genre (link via Arts & Letters Daily). Wood identifies Le Carré's spies as examples of a recurring literary masculine type that leaves him cold:This is the tone, and the philosophical posture, inherited from Greene and, further back, from Hemingway, in which what masquerades as thought is actually just the ratification of permissible male reticence. Versions of this male reticence can be found in the work of Robert Stone, and in some of Andre Dubus's stories; it is almost a universal male vernacular. Such characters--"Leamas was not a reflective man"--are, paradoxically, alert but always blocking the ratiocinative consequences of their alertness. Such characters are not minds but just voyeurs of their own obscurities. One thinks of the end of A Farewell to Arms: "He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew." And that is all we hear on the subject. In such writing, a principled refusal to be sentimental stifles feeling and the description of feeling; and that refusal, in turn, becomes itself somewhat sentimental.
Wood's piece is in part a review of the reviewers who have made claims over the years for Le Carré's literary importance. Definitely worth a look.
Posted March 29, 2004 5:44 AM
