James Wood: “… the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction: the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details (’It was a large room, filled almost entirely by rows of antique computers; there was an odd smell of aftershave and bacon’)…”

Me: “… we often proceeded to the Internet salon in the Soviet part of the city: an infernal building jam-packed with teenagers who were possessedly manipulating avatars through gutted buildings and abandoned warehouses, shooting one another in the back with Uzis. Periodically, some young person, shot in the back one too many times, would leave in disgust, at which point the proprietor rushed to the abandoned station and sprayed the chair and computer keyboard from a can of Sure deodorant. Chemical clouds of shower-fresh deodorant hung in the sultry air, adding a certain je ne sais quoi to the ambience.”

Wood does complain about a lot of the same things I complain about in my trash-talking about MFA fiction (in both The Possessed and my 2006 n+1 piece on short stories), e.g. (to quote him) “the preference for the concrete over the abstract,” “vivid brevity of character-sketching,” and the repetition of proper names (”how strange it is, when you think about it, that thousands of novels are published every year, in which characters all have different names (whereas, in real life, doesn’t one always have at least three friends named John, and another three named Elizabeth?)”). I also wrote about how off-putting all the different supposedly-concrete names are, and how great it is that Tolstoy reuses names, e.g. (to quote me) “Anna’s maid and daughter were both called Anna, and Anna’s son and Levin’s brother were both Sergei. The repetition of names struck me as remarkable, surprising, and true to life.”

That said, I refuse to transform my blog into the vehicle for poring over James Wood and trying to decipher whether he quoted me or not! Wouldn’t he just mention me if he wanted to quote me? I think he would. And I don’t think this is any reason to stop worrying about/ celebrating our kidneys.

Kidney Schmidney – I do believe James Wood has read The Possessed. Is this not the news of the day? Wasn’t that one of your lines he quoted in his recent review: about a room filled with old computers, the smell of aftershave and bacon?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/13/sergei-paradjanov-films-gulag