There was a moment in 1988 when James Wood, then 23, considered staying on at Cambridge to do a PhD. He had earned a first in English and could have graduated into academia. Instead, he looked to his Guardian student journalism award, won – largely for criticism – the year before and gambled on what he called the “romance of living by the pen”. If James Wood were a novel, a beginning like that would presage a barbed comedy of misfortune certain to teach our hero any number of unromantic lessons. If, on the other hand, after a series of fantastic triumphs, the protagonist were to become the pre-eminent literary critic of his generation, while remaining the kind of person with whom one would happily have a drink, a reader might be forgiven for dismissing the story as born of hysterical optimism.
But, as so often, what seems improbable in fiction turns out to be true in life. Wood’s chief obstacle lay in persuading the paper that had given him the journalism award to let him write about books. The then editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston, responded that, yes, Wood could live a life of borderline dereliction in Brixton punctuated by the odd, finely spun essay for a literary magazine but that, on the whole, he should consider beginning as an apprentice reporter: book reviewing was not a proper occupation.
Wood on writing ... and writers
Few critics can make literature sound so vital but just as James Wood’s forensic reading can dazzle with its brilliance , it can leave some novels looking like the scene of an authorial crime. The following are extracts from How Fiction Works:
“Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There is really a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author’s fingerprints on all this are ... traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe, or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.
“The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.”
Undaunted, he wrote to Waldemar Januszczak, the art critic who was then literary editor at the paper, who sent him a book to review on spec. At the time Wood was living in a cramped, freezing house in Herne Hill, south London, so “unbelievably grim” that Claire Messud, his girlfriend from Cambridge, largely avoided visiting him: “She’d come over and find every light bulb in the house was out, bar one,” he explains. Nevertheless, he slowly accumulated serious literary reviews and, in 1991, joined The Guardian’s staff. In 1992 he and Messud married.
For many aspiring critics, a full-time position on a quality newspaper arts desk would be an end in itself, a cul-de-sac of satisfaction. Yet Wood lasted only until 1995, when he was invited to join the American magazine The New Republic, based in Washington, DC. The downside in the arrangement was geographic: with literary Manhattan 200 miles away, Washington was more akin to internal exile. “It’s a dead place,” says Wood. “Unless you are going to conquer it like something out of a Balzac novel, or climb the political world, it’s dead, totally dead.”
The upside was a magazine with a distinguished literary heritage. Among its staff in the 1920s and 1930s was the brilliant Edmund Wilson, a fervent proselytiser for modernist fiction and perhaps the most significant American critic of the 20th century. More importantly, The New Republic offered what a British newspaper could not, and what Wood needed to evolve: a salary for writing really long reviews.
The romance of living by the pen bore both figurative and metaphorical fruit. Messud and Wood have two children, Livia and Lucian (now aged six and four respectively). Her career as a novelist has taken off – The Emperor’s Children was a bestseller and one of The New York Times’s top 10 books of 2006. He has published two books of criticism, The Broken Estate (1999), and The Irresponsible Self (2004), and a novel, The Book Against God (2003). He has also found employment in academe – at Columbia University and Harvard – in the process chalking up a dazzling list of accolades. And next week he publishes How Fiction Works, his third, and what he describes as his “most accessible”, work of criticism. According to the American novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick: “He is our best critic, he thinks with a sublime ferocity.”
There was, of course, also resentment, itself further testament to Wood’s status. In 2004, for example, when four young Ivy Leaguers, among them Benjamin Kunkel, then two years from being known as the author of Indecision, published the first edition of their new literary journal N+1, they announced their presence with a denunciation of Wood as an aesthetics-obsessed “designated hater”. In some essential way, suggested N+1, Wood didn’t understand that modern complex America required complex modes of expression – avant-gardism, postmodernism – and not a return to 19th-century realism.
Wood’s ascent continued and, in 2007, once again in the footsteps of Edmund Wilson, he left The New Republic for The New Yorker, increasing his reach by a million-plus readers.
On Salman Rushdie’s ‘Fury’
“In general, Rushdie’s observations pound a wilderness between incredibility and banality.”
We meet on a January day of arctic ferocity in the other, younger, richer Cambridge, where Wood, 43, is halfway through a five-year, part-time position as professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard. He shows me round the English department offices, formally grand and as exclusive as a 19th-century club, and suggests heading out for a coffee.
It would be easy for anyone in Wood’s position to feel rather satisfied with himself or, to take the opposite tack, pronounce himself dissatisfied with everything. A key to understanding Wood may lie in his childhood in Durham, Northumberland, where filial piety was challenged by his zoologist father’s and schoolteacher mother’s embrace of charismatic evangelicalism – a transcendence he himself could not feel and which he explored in The Book Against God . Sceptical of religious zeal, he made an uneasy peace with its presence. If Wood is intolerant, it is an intolerance for writers who do not, in their fiction, acknowledge the messiness of being human. In person, he is genial company – as happy as a hobbyist with how he spends his time. Perhaps most tellingly, he confesses he enjoys “relaxing” with his children.
Which is not to say he doesn’t fear intellectual stagnation – the reason why, after 12 years, he left The New Republic. “I felt I was likely to repeat myself – reviewing the same books in the same mode,” he says. “A new place will shake me up a little bit and provoke me to think differently about things.” He describes the state of reviewing, or what’s left of it in the mainstream press in America, as “diabolical ... If you get rid of the book section [as a number of papers have done], what you get rid of is, quite literally, the free play of ideas,” he says.
The internet, far from stepping in where print no longer publishes, has proved no boon, in terms of blogging. “It licenses first thoughts, vituperation,” he says. “I don’t go on much to those sort of blogs because there are better things to do with my life.”
At The New Yorker, whose sacerdotal approach to editing and mania for accuracy were derided in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe for leaving readers lost in “whichy thickets”, Wood has now found himself at the fastidious end of the publishing scale, which on the whole is a good thing. As with The New Republic, the editing process is one where he is constantly being asked to go deeper. “I find it isn’t the editors who put that qualification in,” he says, “it’s the fact-checkers. They have to be resisted, because they want to water down unprovable assertions. So you say: ‘There is great disagreement about Cormac McCarthy’s status’ – this was a piece I wrote a couple of years ago when No Country For Old Men came out – and they’ll say to you: ‘Well, I’ve been on the internet and I haven’t found much disagreement actually.’ So you say: ‘Well, for instance, Ian McEwan thinks he’s complete shit.’ ‘Yeah, but we’ll have to say then there’s been “some” disagreement.’ And already it’s getting wimpish.”
On Tom Wolfe’s ‘A Man in Full’
“Unfortunately, Wolfe’s characters only feel one emotion at a time; their inner lives are like jingles for the self. As Picasso had his Blue Period, so Wolfe’s characters have their Angry Period, or their Horny Period, or their Sad Period. But they never have them at the same time, and so the potential flexibility of the stream of consciousness, precisely its lifelike randomness, is nullified.”
His only other peeve is the way the magazine treats the semi-colon. “The New Yorker will try as often as possible to change it into a colon,” he says – ascribing it to an attempt to mimic English properness. “I love semi-colons,” he says with all the enthusiasm of a 10-year-old talking about chocolate. Even those who have praised Wood’s critical insights have at times protested that he is in love with high diction and overwrought metaphor. His novel The Book Against God was chided in the online magazine Slate for being “too well written. Great novelists are not generally celebrated for their style, especially at the sentence level.”
“That’s crazy,” says Wood. “It’s a strikingly anti-formalist thing to say.” Yet, it’s a criticism that seems to speak to a deep, and peculiarly American, suspicion of style – as if “fine” writing were somehow effeminate. “I do think a lot of this is about American masculinity,” says Wood. “The realists from Hemingway onwards retained for themselves a strikingly anti-intellectual stance which had to do with the preservation of a male idea of what writing is – you roll up your sleeves and get on with it. It was also tied in with the whole artisanal aspect of creative writing workshops: it’s about planing a table and making it four square; it’s about drinking a lot; but it’s not about philosophy, it’s not about ideas or aesthetics.”
On Saul Bellow
“Everyone is called a ‘beautiful writer’ at some point or other, just as all flowers are eventually called pretty. ‘Stylists’ are crowned every day ...
“But of course, there are very few really fine writers of prose. This is not surprising, since a prose is a vision, a totality. Great stylists should be as rare as great writers. Saul Bellow is probably the greatest writer of American prose of the 20th century – where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical ... The august raciness, the Melvillian enormities and cascades ... the Joycean wit and metaphoricity, the lancing similes with their sharp American nibs ... the happy rolling freedom of the daring, uninsured sentences, the prose absolutely ripe with inheritance, bursting with the memories of Shakespeare and Lawrence yet prepared for modern emergencies, the Argus eye for detail, and controlling all this, the firm metaphysical intelligence – all this is now thought of as Bellow’s, as ‘Bellovian’.”
One of the things How Fiction Works tries to show is just how central form and aesthetics are to the realist tradition. “A novel,” says Wood, “should always be as well written as it can be.” So it is perhaps not surprising that How Fiction Works should be as well written as criticism can be. The book emerges from Wood’s deep interest in the nuts-and-bolts of fiction, something he has explored over the past two years in four-week master classes in creative writing that he gives at Columbia University’s graduate programme in New York.
Such programmes, often derided by critics, go some way, says Wood, to providing the one thing young writers miss out on in the literary marketplace – an apprenticeship. “The reason I like doing it is that a group of us can talk about craft and technique, and interesting things like how does this person get the character into the room? Of course, I want undergraduates to be thinking of that, too, but ... academic criticism is wary of that – it seems impressionistic, it seems connoisseurial.”
I ask him whether this devotion both to the practical aspects of writing and to advancing serious criticism for the common reader has led to any tension with his more theoretically minded colleagues at Harvard. “I think I’m both tolerated, and appreciated in some ways, as the animal among the zoologists.” He hesitates and qualifies himself: “That sounds wrong. I’m not enough of a creative writer to be among the animals.” He pauses again. “To the extent that, as a reviewer, I’m keeping alive – and presumably, ideally, reminding academics that there is – a living tradition of criticism that predates English studies; to that extent, I’m doing something important.” One of the great problems with literary criticism over the past 30 years, he concludes, is that “the only people worth explicating to, it was thought, were 18-year-olds reading English. And that’s wrong.”
‘How Fiction Works’ (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) is available at £13.59 plus P&P from the FT ordering service. Tel: +44 0870-429 5884 or go to www.ft.com/bookshop
