(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
Few people are as deft at dissecting a novel as James Wood, staff writer on the New Yorker and professor of literary criticism at Harvard. At one point in this elegant little book, Wood subjects what he calls a "really dirty" sentence from Philip Roth to two pages of tenacious analysis, tracking its baroque flourishes and mock-pedantic syntax with admirable self-assurance. There is also a marvellous footnote on Thomas Pynchon's "vaudevillian" fondness for "silly names, japes, mishaps, disguises, farcical errors." Wood combines an almost boyish enthusiasm for fiction—he is forever exclaiming "how wonderful!," "what a stunning paragraph!"—with a cool eye for its wiles and stratagems. He also seems to have read everything from War and Peace to Make Way for Ducklings, though his reading rarely strays beyond the frontiers of the so-called developed world. When it comes to the texture and cadence of a sentence, Wood's uncannily well-tuned ear is hard to improve on.
This kind of talent for close reading is sadly passé. Students of literature these days can say things like "that ominous moon symbol crops up again in the second stanza," but not, as a critic once wrote of a line in TS Eliot, "there's something very sad about the punctuation." When Wood writes of the way in which Flaubert's writing refuses to become involved in the emotion of the material, he is practising a precious kind of criticism that is in danger of vanishing. The same goes for his claim that the feeble storylines of Iris Murdoch's novels are at odds with their complex moral analyses. Today's literature students do not commonly talk, as Wood does here, of the way authors may "loan" a word or phrase to one of their characters, or of the fact that Shakespeare's characters always sound like themselves but always sound like Shakespeare as well. The only blemish on this excellent account of author-character relations is Wood's assumption that Jane Eyre is a reliable first-person narrator, whereas in fact she is—like all of Charlote Brontë's protagonists—malicious, self-serving and partisan.
To write about how fiction works, however, demands more than close analysis. It also involves a clutch of more general concepts, and here Wood is on less certain ground. If he has an Anglo-Saxon passion for the concrete, he also shares something of that culture's anti-theoretical bias. What makes him a superb practical critic—his eye for the offbeat detail, his sense of the irreducible "thisness" of an image—is what disables his more abstract speculations. There's no law that says one has to go abstract; but if you don't like the idea, you should steer clear of subjects like this. People who enjoy novels—realist novels, anyway—do so, among other reasons, because of their vivid particularity; but this is exactly why such people should be wary of discussing the novel form, a discussion in which generality is unavoidable. Rather like alcoholics, what makes them like the stuff also makes their reflections on it unreliable.
Astonishingly, Wood writes about the function of detail in realist fiction without a single reference to the masterwork on this subject, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. Those who have pondered deeply on the novel as a form—Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukás, Ian Watt, Wayne Booth, Frederic Jameson, Michael McKeon—scarcely rate a mention. Henry James and Roland Barthes are rare exceptions. Instead, Wood sails along rather breezily on a blend of common sense and practical criticism, with a touch too much Protestant trust in his own unflickering inner light. If he is cosmopolitan in his fictional tastes, there is a smack of parochialism about his intellectual ones. A deeply unconsequential chapter on sympathy in the novel cries out for more intellectual resources.
Take, for example, the book's reflections on literary character, which mostly come down to a contrast between "flat" and "rounded" ones. Surprisingly, for such a resolute realist, Wood registers his doubts about the notion of "rounded" characters, and rightly points out just how pleasurable and illuminating "flat" figures can be. But this A-levellish approach to character leaves a lot of tough questions unanswered. What would Wood make of Aristotle's claim that character is just a kind of "colouring" on the dramatic action, and that there can be a form of drama without characters at all? What about Brecht's dismantling of character? It is no accident that Wood is mostly silent about Beckett, whose work constitutes among other things a lethal assault on the realist notion of character. There is another bellowing silence on the greatest experimental novel in English of all time, Finnegans Wake. Wood also passes over what some would regard as the finest novel in English, and which is certainly the longest: Samuel Richardson's tragic masterpiece Clarissa. For Wood, the novel really begins with Jane Austen.
Wood dismisses the proposition that characters in literature are "mere bundles of words" without seeing the operative word there is "mere." Literary characters are indeed patterns of words, in the sense that they have no material existence outside a text. We cannot ask what Macbeth was doing before he strides on stage, or whether Sherlock Holmes has a tattoo of Dr Watson's face on his left buttock. But this doesn't mean, as Wood seems to assume, that all we have are words. Just by being words, words yield us a world. It is simply that in what we call fiction, such worlds have no existence independent of them.
Wood is reluctant to acknowledge this because he mistakenly believes that it undermines his beloved realism. Formalism is a particular bugbear of his, though in a footnote he misunderstands the Russian formalists, and he occasionally misuses the word "formalism" to mean "conceived with form." A chapter ambitiously entitled "Truth, Convention, Realism" simply serves to show how egregiously unread in the relevant literature Wood is. Realism is triumphantly identified with "truth-to-life," which is an outrageous kind of cheating: all literary genres claim this in their different ways, whereas realism is the one which clings to verisimilitude as the path to truth. The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy and Beckett's Not I have a smack of truth about them, but not much verisimilitude. No useful distinction is drawn between realism and naturalism. In his zest for the specific detail, Wood, like most post-Romantics, overlooks just how historically recent this passion is. Samuel Johnson thought the specific was boring and irrelevant, and was passionately stirred by the universal. But the book is unhistorical throughout. For Wood, the only context for a novel seems to be other novels—and this from an author eager to anchor writing in "life."
