This is how it feels to me. “Last week James Wood blasted modern fiction,

calling for a return to feeling from self-conscious

cleverness in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Zadie

Smith, one of the novelists he cited, replies.

The critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday

aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called “hysterical

realism”. It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown,

manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth and

a few others he was sweet enough to mention. These are

hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be

effortlessly outstripped – this was Wood’s point, and I’m with him

on it. In fact, I have agreed with him several times before, in

public and in private, but I appreciate that he feared I needed

extra warning; that I might be sitting in my Kilburn bunker

planning some 700-page generational saga set on an

incorporated McDonald’s island north of Tonga. Actually, I am

sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding

nothing funny, scared out of my mind like everybody else,

smoking a family-sized pouch of Golden Virginia. Guardian UK