A Critic's Critic

For readers who want to go beyond the average review by delving deeper into criticism of the novel I recommend James Wood, a professor of literary criticism at Harvard. To put it simply, Wood is a believer in the power of the novel to express the reality of the human condition in a world without God. Although he goes to some lengths to argue that he is not substituting the novel for religion, he puts great faith in the capacity of literature to express reality. His latest contribution to the cause is a slim volume called How Fiction Works, which is refreshingly on the side of practice as opposed to theory. While not exactly easy reading, it’s well worth your time and effort. Woods is a concise writer with a vast knowledge of the literature from which he selects his examples.
As far as I go, however, Woods’ best book is The Broken Estate (1999), a collection of essays on literature and belief now available in paper. Most of the pieces were published elsewhere before appearing in book form, but reading them together leads to a deeper understanding of Woods’ and of his attentiveness to the works under consideration; in other words, he listens to the voices of the novelist rather than imposing a theory of his own, a surprisingly rare gift in a critic.
Subjects run the gamut from Sir Thomas More to Don DeLillo, and include writers as disparate as Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison. Of course Woods has his pet peeves, such as Toni Morrison’s use of “false magic,” which he says corrupts “our ability to judge fiction, which is a measured unreality.” Yet he is open to D.H. Lawrence’s “occultism” because he, Lawrence, is a “mystical realist” who is a poet and preacher at the same time. Read together, these two essays went a long way towards making me understand what I have never liked about the former and loved about the latter. Thus Woods gives readers a critical vocabulary with which to express likes and dislikes.
There’s no obligation to agree with everything he says—that would be to miss the point. But Woods makes us think about what it is the novel does and how it does it. I, for instance, don’t agree with him about Murdoch or John Updike or W.G. Sebald, whom I will never read with y pleasure whatever Woods or anyone else says about his genius. But neither will I read Virginia Woolf again without remembering Woods’ impassioned claim for her. He argues that what she seeks in her art is an “indefinability” of something that can’t be found, but that we all sense, a meaning that is always elusive, “finlike,” that her art at its best is always moving toward. Woods sent me back to her novels with a deepened understanding of their genius. At the end of the book’s last essay, which is on the nature of the broken estate, Wood asks “Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?” Why indeed, but thank the heaven that doesn’t exist for the literature that has been written in that antechamber.