Mannered, Pretty 'Upstate' Is Quiet To A Fault
Critic and novelist James Wood has often dinged other writers for what he calls "hysterical realism," but his new novel Upstate — while beautifully written — goes too far in the other direction.
In a for The New Republic, literary critic James Wood coined a term that's become familiar to lovers of fiction: "hysterical realism." Wood's target was Zadie Smith's "White Teeth," along with novels by Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace and others. "The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity," he wrote. "It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence — as it were a criminal
