James Wood

One is, and maybe this isn't, maybe to you this will seem passe a little bit, but to me it was very interesting.

The notion of, I've been thinking about this James Wood concept of hysterical realism a fair amount, and it's a term that, you know, I'd heard kind of thrown around for a while and associated with particular books and particular writers.

And as I was reading Meditations in Green, I just had the thought like, well, is this book hysterical realism? So I went back to the James Wood article, which I, for people who aren't aware, James Wood's this English literary critic.

He's written many things, including a book called How Fiction Works that a lot of people seem to like.

I'm reading it actually again at the moment, and it's a mixed bag in my opinion.

But in 2000, the year 2000 in the New Republic, in a review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, James Wood coined this term hysterical realism.

And it's used, in the book he uses it to refer to works by, to Infinite Jest, to Underworld, which by Don DeLillo's Underworld, which to me seems like a kind of a clunky fit, but maybe it makes sense.

He uses it to refer to the works of Thomas Pynchon.