Les Revue des Revues

What happened is this: Jonathan Lethem wrote a book (The Fortress of Solitude) and James Wood reviewed it in The New Republic, and then Jonathan Lethem reviewed that review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. This is a review of Lethem’s review.

When authors confront critics, sparks are guaranteed to fly. On this front, Lethem does not disappoint. While he admits that he’s “not actually trying to read James Wood’s mind, or to change it now,” he spares no expense when it comes to that time-honored literary tradition: Name-calling. Over the course of nearly 2,000 words, Lethem calls Wood passive-aggressive, weary, wounded, and, most damningly, an aristocrat.

Lethem starts off with over 500 words of quotations from Renata Adler, Morris Dickstein, Randall Jarrell, and James Wood. I skipped most of it, save for the quotation from Wood that ends, “All great writers are essentially alike.” That seems horribly reductive, but perhaps Lethem has something up his sleeve. When a writer uses an epigraph (or four), a not unreasonable expectation is created in the reader’s mind that the ideas, much like a gun in the first act, will come into play in a some meaningful way down the line.

Lethem begins his review of Wood’s review by noting that, “eight years later, I haven’t quit thinking about it.” Is this because the original review was so indelibly insightful that Lethem carries its words around with him to this day? Quite the opposite. In 4,200 words, Wood struggled with the mixed emotions that The Fortress of Solitude spurred within him, ultimately giving it a mixed review and telling Lethem that he at least “liked the book so much more than any of your other work.”

Lethem, however, was not in the mood to receive news that his novel was less than a tour de force through the English language. “I had expectations,” writes Lethem. “That fatal state. … The letdown startled me. ” Lethem writes of being “harassed” by an “armorless knight.” 

The bulk of Lethem’s disappointment lies not in the fact that Wood’s response to his work was so tepid, but that Wood did not “mention that my characters found a magic ring that allowed them flight and invisibility.” By ignoring such a painstakingly hackneyed plot point, Wood had failed to recognize Lethem’s cleverness. Lethem admits that Wood’s review is “erudite,” but also disses it as “jive.” (One must assume Lethem’s use of a 1970s slang term is a nod to The Fortress of Solitude’s 1970s setting.)

Lethem continues to hammer away at Wood, writing, “I doubt Wood’s ever glanced back at the piece. But I’d like to think that if he did, he’d be embarrassed.” After a lengthy diatribe where Lethem debates the existence of God and Santa Claus, we’re treated to this sentence that caused my mind to explode into a thousand pieces: “They interpenetrate and, ultimately, demand familiarity with the Bloomian sort of core-canonical literacy.”

Now, granted, this sentence may have sounded brilliant in the echo-chamber of Lethem’s own derriere. I don’t know. What I do know is that I literally could not read any further without courting madness. This leads to a first in the storied history of Les Revue des Revues: A grade of “DNF” (did not finish). I have no idea if any of the quotations, including the one from Woods about all great writers being alike, ever amounted to anything.

Read Jonathan Lethem’s review of James Wood’s review of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude.

– Andrew Shaffer