Walter Kirn says he has no hidden agendas, he only gives honest reactions to a book. So what? Even if you’re honest, does that mean you are right? A while ago, Kirn had owned up to the pleasures to be had from forming opinions of writers one had never read. He hadn’t read Sebald and “other highly ranked European worthies.” Of course, there was some posing going on there. I’m not implying that Kirn had actually read Sebald and others; it’s just that there was some self-satisfaction and smirking in parading his philistinism. The same posturing is on display in Kirn’s review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

Kirn writes: “Wood’s study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by the inarguable erudition displayed in his compact vade mecum of short chapters and neatly numbered sections devoted to such topics as point of view, characterization, fictional detail and, toward the end, nothing less than ‘A Brief History of Consciousness.’ He drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed.” Reading this with barely three sips of one’s coffee, it’s easy to think Kirn was mocking Wood’s wide reading and making a case for healthy, down-to-earth American anti-intellectualism. But that’s not it. There’s fair exhibition of learning and snobbery in the review too, so to think of it only as an attack on reading is to miss the fact that it is mostly a personal attack. Actually, to put it in the native idiom, Kirn is being plain nasty.

It is easy to miss on one’s first reading but detectable in the rant is an argument about writers and writing, especially about writers who, Kirn says, “expand or alter perception by exalting the vernacular, absorbing the anarchic and ennobling the vulgar.” (I know Kirn doesn’t want to deal with anything outside the covers of the book–honest criticism!–but I’d have liked him to take note of Wood on Richard Price or Roth.) In any case, I’d have been more persuaded by Kirn’s attack on Wood as old-fashioned and donnish if I didn’t suspect that in this instance too our reviewer was acting in bad faith. Remember his attack on Jonathan Safran Foer? To Foer and his peers (who can’t really be called experimental, since their signature high jinks, distortions and addenda first came to market many decades back and now represent a popular mode that’s no more controversial than pre-ripped bluejeans), a novel is an object composed of pages tattooable with an infinite variety of nonsentence-like signs and signifiers. As Foer’s new book demonstrates, some pages can even be left blank…. Once they’ve cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today’s neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today’s realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery. The avant-garde tool kit, developed way back when to disassemble established attitudes and cut through rusty sentiments, has now become the best means, it seems, for restoring them and propping them up. And Kirn is now the champion of the new? It’s better to call today’s review a dishonest exercise in intellectual opportunism.

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