James Wood: The literary critic who is seriously worth noticing

The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood (Cape, £12.99)

James Wood is one of that rare breed of literary critics whose reviews you’d rather read than whoever it is he’s writing about. In his long essays for the New Yorker he often seems more alert to a novel’s deeper themes and resonances than the author ever was. The late Christopher Hitchens is said to have told his students to ignore his review of John Updike’s Terrorist and read Wood instead.

Still, though his slow-motion vivisections have marked many authors (Zadie Smith changed her approach after he described her early work as “hysterical realism”), he rarely seems interested in wielding the hatchet. He is at his best when he is at his most passionate, for he sees his role as an advocate for fiction itself. It’s as if he needs writers to be better writers and readers to be better readers to protect it from a generalised threat.

His latest collection is a blend of criticism and memoir, drawn from various lectures and essays. It takes its title from George Eliot’s comment that “art is the nearest thing to life”. It’s a line he kept returning to in his 2008 literary users’ manual, How Fiction Works (2008) — and Wood is still fascinated by the careful tapestry of artifice and verisimilitude that fiction needs to create the illusion of reality.

For Wood, the most important way an author creates the illusion is not by creating a coherent plot but by flashing compelling details. An author’s talent for “serious noticing”, he believes, will “rescue the life of things from their death … the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavours, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention.” Here, he praises the “serious noticing” of contemporary writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Kushner as much as Tolstoy, James and Bellow.

Still, for all his focus on detail, the appeal of the novel for young Wood — a solemn child from an earnest, devout, intellectual family in Durham — was also in the companionship of realistic characters and the opportunity to eavesdrop on their “failed privacies”. He relished the “sublime discovery of the novel and short story as an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered” and believes “an essentially novelistic understanding of motive has helped me to begin to fathom what someone else really wants from me, or from another person.”

He makes a case for the holy qualities of fiction, believing that readers of novels suspend their disbelief in a kind of metaphorical substitute for religious faith. Novelists should be engaged with “what it means to have divine power over someone’s beginnings and endings”.

Wood keeps returning to religion in a way that suggests his childhood spent in the pews of Durham Cathedral left a deep impression. However, when it comes to recounting his own life he lacks the confessional urge to describe why. Instead we get an English reserve that recoils from anything so cute. We are missing the exquisite details, the humanity that he passionately argues for. The final and most original essay on exile and homelessness (Wood moved to the US in 1995) contains many beautiful reflections on the elusive idea of “home” but his arguments about how fiction deals with this sense of “loss, some kind of falling away” feel tenuous and under-developed.

Wood said in an interview two years ago that if he didn’t write another review for another 10 years — and wrote “other things” — he would be happy. But I, for one, would miss his serious noticing.

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