Issyvoo

Michael Wood’s opinions

• Solar

  Solar is full of accidents on the level of plot that are crafty strokes of intention on the level of plotting.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Wood New York Review of Books 2010
• American Pastoral

  But the mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable, and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated, to see that Mr. Roth didn’t entirely abandon Henry James after all.

  Read the full piece at New York Times Michael Wood New York Times 1997
• The Age of Innocence

  A story about time and morals, delicately poised between a feeling that its abstinences were a horrible waste of spirit and a feeling that they represented a fineness of judgment since lost to the world.

  Read the full piece at London Review of Books Michael Wood London Review of Books 1994
• Mr Palomar

  What is delicately mocked, in this impeccably straight-faced prose, is writing itself: the ambitions and stiffness and poverty of writing, in the face of the multiple, shifting, unwritten world.

  Read the full piece at London Review of Books Michael Wood London Review of Books 1985
• Sabbatical: A Romance

  But there is a flatness in the book that these likable characters cannot redeem. Partly this is the result of the heavy-handedness that is felt everywhere. “That storm blew up like a sawed-off simile,” Fenwick says. Mock solemnity keeps turning into the real thing…

  Read the full piece at New York Times Michael Wood New York Times 1982
• Autumn of the Patriarch

  There is a wavering of style running through the book […]: a note of what ought to be parody but actually reads like fine writing smuggled in behind the shifts of narrative point of view.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Wood New York Review of Books 1976
• Breakfast of Champions

  Some of the gags […] are so lamentable that they amount almost to a metaphysical proposition, a late form of Vonnegut statement: life has degenerated to a level beneath that of a lousy joke.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Wood New York Review of Books 1973
• Kurt Vonnegut

  I am tempted to think a writer should just not write, or at least not publish, under these circumstances, and certainly that would be tactful. But on further thinking I find I admire Vonnegut for going ahead. A writer’s business is writing, after all, and maybe even terrible jokes do some good; or maybe some of the jokes are not as bad as all that.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Wood New York Review of Books 1973
• Slaughterhouse-Five

  Slaughterhouse Five tells us time is an eternal present tense, so that no one dies, but merely seems to be in bad shape at the moment of death.

  Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Michael Wood New York Review of Books 1973