Splinters

In a round-up of the fiction to be published in the new year, I was surprised to see the critic James Wood is releasing a debut novel: The Book Against God. The blurb says it explores questions of belief and unbelief, truth and lies, the relation of father and son, and husband and wife, in a tone that is at once poignant and funny. Above all, it introduces readers to the irrepressible presence of its narrator, Thomas Bunting, liar, doubter, and the strangest philosopher in contemporary fiction. I hope somebody sends me a review copy.

It reminds me of a remark in a Guardian review by Jason Cowley that I discovered recently, although it appeared nearly two years ago:

Martin Amis and I were talking about why the critic James Wood, comfortably the smartest of his generation, had not written a novel, despite having signalled his intention to do so. Amis' explanation was convincing: Wood was almost too intelligent to write fiction. "There's something dumb about all the great writers of fiction, a certain stupidity" he said.

Now that Wood has actually written a novel, we can perhaps investigate the validity of Amis' opinion. Before then, however, I will leap in and say that it is a meaningless assertion anyway. Much as I think there's a necessity for a novelist to put suspicion aside, if you are, as Amis accuses Wood, too intelligent to write a novel, then it follows that you aren?t intelligent enough to realise "a certain stupidity" is required ? and if you have realised that, you are then too intelligent to make use of it as you are evidently more intelligent than those who haven't. Stands to reason dunnit?

One novelist who has been accused of being overly-intelligent is Nicholson Baker, and he's got a new one out in February: A Box of Matches. Again, I hope a review copy comes my way. I really admire his 1995 book The Fermata, a novel about a man who stops time and uses it for sexual purposes. Apparently there's a film in the pipeline, which staggers me. It's bound to water down what makes the book, er, special. I wish I'd written a review at the time explaining why The Fermata is really about the ethics of novel writing. Another time perhaps.