Readers of Life

James Wood, How Fiction Works, pp. 65-66:

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things that now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.

Essays by James Wood

From "Hysterical Realism":

Which way will the ambitious contemporary novel go? Will it dare a picture of life, or just shout a spectacle? (193)

From "Jonathan Franzen and the 'Social Novel'":

Dr. Johnson suggested that a hundred years' survival might be the test of a book's aesthetic power. Aesthetic success is measured in leagues of posterity. (199)

Franzen's Harper's essay proposed, in effect, a softened DeLilloism. What is retained from DeLillo is the tentacular ambition, the effort to pin down an entire writhing culture. The DeLilloian idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry, has been woefully influential, and will take some time to die; nowadays, anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move. (201)

Quoting from two paragraphs:

In particular, we see that the Lambert children, despite their successful and free lives as adults, are unfree, because they are still above all parented. All decisions, consciously or not, are routed via the parental desk—and so the Lambert children, like many of us, are really only honorary adults, ex officio. 

Family is the great determinism. One of the subtlest and most moving aspects of Franzen's often distinguished book is the way he develops the idea of "correction" as a doomed struggle against this determinism. (203)

Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.