James Wood: Hungry, Happy Bookworm

If James Wood, today’s preeminent reviewer of literary fiction, were reviewing The Fun Stuff, a collection of 23 of his essays published between 2004 and 2011 in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, he would be thorough, he would be specific, he would quote a lot, and he would appreciate the critic’s range and unpushy persuasiveness: “Certainly, the novella 'Agamemnon’s Daughter,' which [Ismail] Kadare wrote in the mid-1980s, around the time of [Enver] Hoxha’s death, is laceratingly direct and bitterly lucid. It is perhaps his greatest book, and, along with its sequel, 'The Successor,' surely one of the most devastating accounts ever written of the mental and spiritual contamination wreaked on the individual by the totalitarian state.” The polite Englishman might not point out, as I rudely would, that only laziness would prevent a reader of Wood’s essay from seeking out that Albanian novelist’s work.