Passions ran deep at the 92Y Poetry Center Monday night when New Yorker book critic James Wood (who has many admirers) took the stage to “re-think” the work of the late David Foster Wallace (who has quite the cult following).

Die-hard Wallace fans were in attendance, including some literary bloggers: Edward Champion at Ed Rants; The Daily Snowman; and Martin Schneider of Emdashes, who called Woods “prudent, insightful, excellent.”

Schneider at Emdashes continued:

...Wood (probably correctly) chided Wallace for an unwillingness to just leave it alone, to let the ambiguity remain. Wallace “tends to overplay his hand,” which tendency leads him to unveil narrative corkers in his stories’ finales that might better have gone merely suggested: “Beckett does not give you the key; Wallace spoils it by giving you the key.”

During the Q&A, there was an excellent question by an older gentleman that went something like, “Can you address the idea of meta-fiction, and meta-meta-fiction, and ... how many metas one can tolerate without losing one’s mind?” Wood clearly found this very resonant, stating that one of Wallace’s key themes is indeed precisely that “one can’t escape all of those ‘metas,’ and one also can’t, unfortunately, lose one’s mind.” That is, we lose ourselves in the recursive mental spirals, in which consciousness tends to keep us mired.

The sold out event was titled “First Reads” – a new Poetry Center program where a critic is invited to read a book they never read before, then return to the Poetry Center and discuss it. We hope to hold another soon and will announce it here on the blog when it’s scheduled.

In the meantime, some upcoming Readings at 92Y Poetry Center include Ian McEwan on Apr 6, Louise Glück and Dunya Mikhail on Apr 8, Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey on Apr 26 and Opening Night of the PEN World Voices Festival on Apr 28.

All of the above readings are just $10 for those aged 35 and under; see all discounted events for ages 35 and under here.

The 2009-2010 Reading Series at 92Y is sponsored by:

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