Hey, Christopher Shea! Over here!
It’s a nice piece, my friend, but I must take issue with this:
The job change will answer one criticism that has dogged him — the suggestion that, however talented, he [James Wood] was a hatchet man for the editor Leon Wieseltier, whose literary pages at The New Republic manifest delight in popping reputations. “Somehow TNR got the best people,” the literary magazine N + 1 wrote in its debut issue, in 2004, “and encouraged their worst instincts.”
While it’s true that Leon had a hatchet man, it wasn’t Mr. Wood. Dale Peck, who essentially raped Rick Moody and was then, quite literally, bitch-slapped by Stanley Crouch, was not only Leon’s go-to for hatchet work, but actually wrote a book called…
So then Wood was…what? Just a bastard-coated bastard with bastard filling in his own right?