For James Wood, great fiction is always a venture into danger--a
journey to the farthest shores. By extension, great criticism too
should demand and risk all. And his first collection, The Broken
Estate, does so again and again. Since Wood graduated from
Cambridge in the 1980s and began reviewing for The Guardian, his
name has been preceded by phrases such as enfant terrible and
followed by adjectives such as fierce, fearless, and occasionally
far worse. Few critics have such an urgent relation to their
reading, and it is this, combined with his all-encompassing
intellect and verbal velvet, that makes Wood so terrifying--and
so tender.
In his introduction to The Broken Estate he writes, "The gentle
request to believe is what makes fiction so moving" (gentle, as
both adjective and verb, and its adverbial form, seem key terms),
and this is what Wood is drawn to explore in the Russian greats
and the English, European, and American moderns, among others.
Many of these essays originally appeared in the London Review of
Books and The New Republic, where he is a senior editor, but his
book is far from a bundle of accident. Wood's contention is that
in the mid-19th century, the "distinctions between literary
belief and religious belief" began to blur (or, depending on the
writer, shimmer), causing a crisis for the likes of Melville,
Gogol, and Flaubert, and leading to "a skepticism toward the real
as we encounter it in the narrative." I suspect, however, that
some will head straight for the pieces on their literary loves
and not be so concerned with Wood's overarching thesis, at least
initially. No matter. Each essay also stands on its own, whether
the author is positing Jane Austen as "a ferocious innovator"
more radical than Flaubert, Melville as the ultimate linguistic
spendthrift, or Gogol as "a defensive fantasist."
In a brilliant take on Virginia Woolf--Wood makes even the
much-discussed new--he declares (admits?) that "the
writer-critic, wanting to be both faithful critic and original
writer," is caught "in a flurry of trapped loyalties." But he
himself almost always works his way out of such snares, one of
the many joys of this book. In his analysis of the several sides
of Thomas More, for example, Wood first reads Utopia as a comedy
but then suggests we read it "more tragically--not as a Lucianic
satire but as a darkly ironic vision of the impossible." The
aphorisms and aperçus come thick and strong. (Keepers of
commonplace books should start a separate volume just for Wood.)
For example, "Leslie Stephen acted like a genius but he thought
like a merely gifted man." Or, "Hemingway has a reputation as a
cold master of repetition, an icicle formed from the drip of
style, while Lawrence is most often seen as a hothead who fell
over himself, verbally." And he also has a gift for the telling
domestic detail: Gogol "irritated others by playing card games he
had invented and then changing the rules during play. He became
rather selfishly involved with undercooked macaroni cheese, a
dish he made again and again for guests." But Wood will dislike
being complimented on his sentences as much as he cls Woolf
did. His art, too, must be measured in chapters.
Wood is a great lover, and this makes him if not a great hater
then one who gets hot under the critical collar, his ardor
turning to and intemperance in pieces on Morrison,
Pynchon, and Murdoch. But in his finest discussions--among them
one on Chekhov and another on late-20th-century treasure W.G.
Sebald--he instantly quickens writers, books, and readers into
being. --Kerry Fried