Wood's book sounds like a useful guide for an aspiring writer to own, but I've learned as a sometimes aspiring writer that buying books on writing is an excellent way to procrastinate writing itself, which is the best way to improve.

But enough of that, the linked essay was more interesting. In his long list of impossible coincidences and fantastic situations he includes "a Jewish scientist genetically engineering a mouse". What of it? Scientists engineer mice all the time. Mice and rats are made that are more suseptible to this or that type of cancer, so as to test cancer drugs. Or a particular gene is knocked out, to determine its effects on the mice. Thousands of scientists were involved in such endeavors 8 years ago and many more are now. Surely any number of them are Jewish.

Now it may be that the type of genetic engineering in the book Wood references is particularly fantastic--the mouse has human intelligence or can survive deadly levels of radiation, but if that is the case it ought to be briefly stated. To assume that the mere genetic engineering of a mouse is in any way odd or unusual in this day and age betrays a real lack of even the most lay understanding of the ways genetic science has affected the world. It's something I find very odd in a literary critic.