Chekhov’s Mistess

Everybody Loves James Wood (almost)

Nicholas Lezard opens his Guardian review of James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self by putting his adoration in good company:

He is, to take a rough average of all the glowing critical comments he has garnered, our best living reviewer, or as close to the position as makes little difference. That puts him up there with Christopher Ricks, or even the historical pantheon of Eliot, Empson and Leavis.

This gives him lee under which he spews a truly glowing appraisal, going so far as claiming that Wood makes “the world a better place by praising writers who stay on the ball, or pointing out when they stray from it, or were never actually near it in the first place” and saying of one book, that Wood completely absolved him of reading because the “novel itself could only come as an anti-climax” after Wood’s introduction.

With what I think is a more interesting assessment, Jennifer Schuessler’s 2003 NYRB review of his novel, The Book Against God and previous collection of criticism, The Broken Estate, begins:

In the fifteen years since he first began reviewing books for a living, the British writer James Wood has established himself as perhaps the strongest, and strangest, literary critic we have…Wood combines an elegant literary style and magisterial command of the canon with a fierce moral passion that threatens, at times, to come slightly unhinged.

I love “unhinged” and it’s a compliment, even when she says that Wood is “…ruthless when it comes to sniffing out falsity in fiction.” It’s a compliment because in summating Wood this way she is really just setting us up for a comparison between Wood’s criticism and his own novel, where she has much more to say:

Autobiographical fiction is hardly a scandal. But there is something odd about a critic whose ideal form of the novel involves characters with the freedom to outrun their creators’ designs, and who creates a character so like himself in broad outlines, and then gives him so many lecturing lines that seem plucked from his own writing




And what, in the end, is the point of a novel of ideas if all the fictional conjuring doesn’t bring the ideas to a new kind of life? For in the essay we also find something that is lacking in Wood’s novel—a certain wildness, an arresting voice, a powerful character. Speaking entirely of others—speaking, that is, impersonally—Wood in his essays has created a voice of genuine interest and authority. The drama and tension of Wood’s criticism comes from the way it combines a calm mastery of the details with flashes of white-hot righteous passion. Instead of the voice of a self-proclaimed liar, it’s a voice of ruthless, even reckless, directness. Wood’s assaults on Updike, Morrison, and DeLillo are far more audacious and involving than anything Thomas attempts to say from the pulpit at his father’s funeral. They are also more entertaining.

In using each book to review the other, Schuessler leaves us with a somewhat more equivocal view than Lezard, but with more of a sense of who we are dealing with and why he’s interesting, at least as a critic.

On the other side of the aisle, we have Wood’s detractors. No one I know of is as critical of the critic than Dan Green of The Reading Experience who has said that:

Ultimately his reviews and essay-reviews are detrimental not just to the cause of literary criticism but to the continued appreciation of the possibilities of literature itself.

Dan began another entry with “James Wood indulges in his usual hectoring sermon masquerading as a book review.” This, interestingly, compelled Mr. Wood himself to reply in the comments section of that post (ah the instantaneous satisfaction of the Web). And this wasn’t the first time Wood defended himself at Dan’s site.

Knowing that, I should not have been surprised when n+1 magazine published Wood’s eleven page rebuttal to their own criticism of him. In that issue, their first, the editors memorably characterized Wood as seeming “to want to be his own grandfather.” But this “silliness,” as Wood calls it, was in context of taking The New Republic, where Wood is a senior editor, to task for its negative and indiscriminate approach to book reviews, and notoriously, as they described it, “taking down” famous authors.

It’s impossible to say how an eleven page rebuttal came about, but when Wood says in it that because of influences like the internet we are “far more self-conscious than at anytime in history…” we take notice of the fact that we are indeed reading a self-conscious act and wonder, despite its elegance, why this essay was written. Most people I know in the arts don’t concern themselves unduly with their critics – they pay attention, but they are their own harshest evaluators, so why bother. But Wood makes his defense into an exposition of his beliefs, which I think is an altogether more interesting proposition.

Without this reverse-looking manifesto, his essay could be narrowed down to one sentence naming the 29 modern writers he has praised, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot for a 17 year career (and sorry, you’ll have to buy the magazine to find out who they are). But if it had been so simple as pointing out his positive reviews, we wouldn’t have the fun of seeing him disown Dale Peck entirely:

The critic should be wary of endlessly chasing the bad. I don’t care at all for Dale Peck’s enormous, steroidal renunciations, nor for the temperature of his rhetoric…

The one constant theme that surfaces with discussions of Wood is his religious-like zeal. Wood “was brought up in an evangelical sect of the Church of England” and this biographical trait manifests itself in his own writing as well as others’ characterizations of him. That’s not necessarily bad. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the world it’s that people always believe a believer even if they don’t believe in his beliefs. For that zeal, and for his lively and often elegant writing, I too like James Wood.

So as curious as it is, Wood outlines his ideal novel and his ideal critic, an interesting and worthwhile but futile exercise in a messy world, and sets the stage for what the editors of n+1 promise as a “roundtable on the current state of American fiction” coming in a future issue. If they were to do that as well as Wood set out his reply to the editors, it would be a monument to what they are trying to accomplish and far more positive effort than their initial stab at Wood.

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: October 05, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:0
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