Walter Kirn is one of those critics whose writing is usually better than the stuff he’s reviewing. He shares James Wood’s knack for the pithy putdown (Wood on John Updike: “It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book.”) but not the latter’s propensity to view all contemporary literature through the lens of an unyielding aesthetic. (Wood seems to think that the novel has become alienated from its 19th-century roots, swapping a focus on character for a DeLillo-esque obsession with info. He might have a point but I don’t think that novels such as Monica Ali’s plodding Brick Lane, which Wood praised highly, are the way forward.)In contrast, Kirn seems to be more amenable to whatever mutations contemporary culture might inflict on the modern novel. Perhaps this is the pragmatism of the working novelist–whatever works is OK–showing through. (Wood has also published a novel–acceptable but not outstanding, I’ve heard–but it seems more a diversion in the Edmund Wilson mode than the first budding of a second career.)This doesn’t mean that Kirn can’t get the knife out when it’s required. Take this devastating summation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the latest novel from Jonathan Safran Foer–literature’s answer to Jake Gyllenhaal (the current master of the whole sensitive man-boy shtick): “Once they’ve cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today’s neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today’s realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery. The avant-garde tool kit, developed way back when to disassemble established attitudes and cut through rusty sentiments, has now become the best means, it seems, for restoring them and propping them up. No traditional story could put forward the tritenesses that Foer reshuffles, folds, cuts into strips, seals in seven separate envelopes and then, astonishingly, makes whole, causing the audience to ooh and aah over notions that used to make it groan.”Rarely has a critical shiving been performed so entertainingly.Anyway, Kirn is a “guest blogger” (my, how this “genre” is maturing) over at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. It’s interesting to see how a “real writer” still tries to maintain decorum in the geek playpen that is the Web.