Cold-Shouldered 
James Wood
- Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books by John Carey
John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities. The enemy has stayed the same – roughly, overweening literary Modernism. Has Carey’s curious Oxonian populism truly changed, or just, as it were, moved colleges?
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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory · David Bezmozgis
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
At the tent flap sin crouches · The Fleshpots of Egypt
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
Gossip in Gilt · John Updike’s Licks of Love
Bohumil Hrabal · the life, times, letters and politics of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal
Damaged Beasts · Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’
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