The work of literary critics may do something for university students and other literary critics, but it seldom does much for creative writers or common readers. Criticism, whether in the form of short reviews just after publication or longer analysis later, is one of the main obstacles to the production and appreciation of good books. Yet there are exceptions, when criticism genuinely illuminates literature and may even become literature itself. The initial test usually comes when the first collection of periodical articles is published as a book-and most would-be critics fail at this stage.
After a decade as a reviewer, first in university papers and then in the Guardian, latterly mainly in the London Review of Books and the New Republic (and also Prospect), James Wood has established a reputation as an unmistakable if uneven critic. The Broken Estate recycles a few of his many essays, in more or less revised form, together with a short introduction and a long conclusion. My first reaction is that he is much more readable in a book than in a periodical, because he is a difficult writer who demands plenty of space and time. My next reaction is that he is extraordinarily clever, which has already been realised by most of his readers and has now been recognised by almost all his reviewers. The final reaction is that he still shares too many of the occupational diseases of his profession.
His review articles address various writers and are of varying quality. I can't judge his judgements of WG Sebald, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, because I can't finish any of their books, although I enjoy what he says about them. I agree with his dispraise of John Updike but disagree with his praise of Philip Roth. I appreciate his seriously clever demolition of the frivolous cleverness of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. I am dissatisfied by his abstract dissatisfaction with Iris Murdoch's abstract theory and practice of fiction. I relish his too brusque attack on George Steiner. I go with him on TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf-although I wish he would go further-but I can't go with him on Flaubert or DH Lawrence. I am bored by him on Thomas Mann, impressed by him on Herman Melville, delighted by him on Gogol and Chekhov, and fascinated by him on how Jane Austen heroines read their own stories.
But Wood is writing about (religious) belief as well as literature. His introduction uncompromisingly but unsuccessfully argues that fiction is a quasi-religious genre, and several of his articles engage with the religious or anti-religious messages of writers. Indeed, the first one is a satisfying if anachronistic attack on Thomas More. The conclusion of the book is an unsatisfying if enjoyable attack on writers who have tried during the past 150 years to steer a course between belief and unbelief but who have become becalmed in disingenuous or even dishonest waters-from Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold to Paul Johnson, Richard Swinburne and Don Cupitt. A revealing section describes Wood's own religious background, divided between an evangelical family and education in a cathedral choir school, and his conventional loss of faith, helped by some of the usual suspects-Hume, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus. (This piece apparently began as a sermon at Worcester College, Oxford-and it doesn't fit with the rest of the book.)
In the end, however, criticism, like literature, is a matter of language. Here Wood keeps tripping over himself. Contrary to Flaubert, he labours for the mot injuste, so that we are repeatedly diverted from his arguments by wondering whether their most crucial words may be deliberate mistakes or careless misprints. Take the first sentence of the book: "The real is the atlas of fiction, over which all novelists thirst." Atlas? Thirst? Wood seems almost unconscious of his self-conscious English, which would be all too easy to parody. One result is that we are often uncertain about his judgement of British and American writers' language. Another is that he often fails to land or even aim the final blow-he misses that the worst thing about Murdoch is not her flat characters but her flat narrative; not Steiner's pretentious rhetoric but his tortured sentences; not Martin (and Kingsley) Amis's trivial plots but his self-satisfied style. And at times Wood himself lapses into unforgivable verbal banality. He is what used to be called an "Ittite"-he repeats "it" 16 times in the short opening paragraph of his Pynchon piece-and when he gets really excited about a writer he lazily grabs at the weakest words in the critical lexicon-"beautiful," "lovely," "gorgeous." Why have his publishers let such a serious writer get away with such sloppy writing?
Never mind. James Wood always makes us think, and he often makes us feel that he is not just a very wide and a very deep reader but also a very real and remarkable critic. The Broken Estate is a good start for a first book from a writer in his early 30s; but he would do better if he didn't try so hard.
The broken estate
James Wood
Jonathan Cape 1999, ?16.99
