I'm currently reading James Wood's How Fiction Words, which I've so far found to be excellent and well worth reading, though I don't always agree with Wood's specific judgments. I ran across this humorous assessment in a review of Wood's book:

But, like many public figures who are so reliably excellent they risk monotony, Wood is saved from his abilities by his fascinating limitations. He is, in spite of his prodigious gifts, mystifyingly, perversely, delightfully limited. His sensibility—high-minded, self-serious, evangelical—seems to have been pickled back in 1863, so that he appears to be carrying out a Borgesian experiment of restaging Matthew Arnold’s entire career in an era that has learned to ignore Victorian sagery. Among our book blogs and digital libraries and metacritical review-collating hyperlinked global salons, Wood remains provocatively analog. His pronouncements arrive walnut-paneled, camphor-sprinkled, and attended by retinues of white-gloved footmen. (As the journal n+1 once put it, it’s like he seems “to want to be his own grandfather.”) I recently suffered a moment of deep existential disorientation when I realized that Wood, at 43, is actually three years younger than David Foster Wallace, who radiates a generational energy to which Wood is apparently totally immune. Wood’s rare and cursory references to pop culture—Seinfeld, Amazon, Ricky Gervais—are always jarring, like a videotaped hostage holding a copy of today’s newspaper to prove he’s still alive.