The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library Paperbacks)

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.

"In America, where he now makes his home, consensus is building that James Wood, a thirty-four-year-old English-man, is the best literary critic of his generation. . . . Wood is not just a keen critic, our best, but a superb writer. James Wood is the kind of writer James Wood admires most: daring, meaty, boldly metaphoric and unequivocally committed."--Adam Begley, Financial Times

"After finishing one of James Wood's essays, I always feel that I have been in the company of a man who reads more perspicaciously and writes more incisively than almost anyone producing criticism today. His ability to transform complex, anxious thought into lucid, exciting prose is everywhere present in this wonderful book, as is an atmos-phere of civility, good sense, and justice."--Janet Malcolm

"In these essays a very bold intelligence illuminates literature and culture with a dashing fluency."--Elizabeth Hardwick

"In a distinctively impassioned voice, James Wood advances some formidable arguments for what fiction and the truthful deployment of the imagination can be. He is one of literature's true lovers, and his deeply felt, contentious essays are thrilling in their reach and moral seriousness."--Susan Sontag

"He is a true critic: an urgent, impassioned reader of literature, a tireless interpreter, a live and learned intelligence, good writing company. He has adopted the essay as his own; he uses it to write, in a way the serious writer does. That's to say, he drives his ideas hard; he hungers for metaphor . . . learned . . . cunningly brilliant."--Malcolm Bradbury, The New Statesman

"A book that makes you feel, having closed it, as if your mind has been oxygenated. While most reviewers tend to fall back on preconceived notions of good style, based mainly on their desire not to be challenged by fiction, Wood stands out for his desire to re-mint critical thought. He has the capacity to alert you all over again to the wonder of a single cadence, pulled out of the heart of a novel. He also forces you to reconsider what it is we mean when we say that a novel is real, is true, is great. There is no more, really, that we can ask of a critic."--Natasha Walter, The Independent on Sunday

"In this climate, James Wood's book is not just a pleasure in itself but a sign that things do not always necessarily go downhill. . . . 'Serious' books on literature and belief abound, but we have very few critics who can vie with Jarrell and Toynbee, who can remind us that talking about literature is a part of what literature is about, and talking about it with passion, precision, and out of a rich store of reading is a rare and precious gift: it is good for all of us that James Wood has it and we have James Wood."--Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement

"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity. To enter Wood's mind is to cross a threshold: from the reviewer commonplaces that often pass for essay-writing into the intellectual daring that portends literary permanence. He is, for the moment, our Hazlitt. He may become something more."--Cynthia Ozick

"James Wood is an authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time."--Harold Bloom

Actually, Wood writes quite well about God. Religion is the subject of his handful of good essays: in particular his look at God-haunted Herman Melville and the autobiographical title essay which explores Wood's own loss of religious faith. But spilt religion is his measure for all human experience, which is a strange point of view for someone who almost always writes about novels. Novels tend to be rather pagan, agnostic, compromised affairs. Which might explain why Wood usually writes about novelists without saying much about their novels. With Iris Murdoch, for example, he concentrates on her essays; his few words about her fiction--A FAIRLY HONORABLE DEFEAT--are just plain wrong. With other authors, such as Updike or Morrison, Wood picks at a sentence or two to suggest their prose style, then jumps ahead to their overarching themes and big ideas. He has almost nothing to say about characters or story, which for some of us is the meat and meaning of fiction. It's no surprise that Wood's favorite contemporary novelist, W.G. Sebald, is someone who's pulled off the difficult trick of writing novels WITHOUT characters or story.

Now and then Wood can come up with a nice turn of phrase, but this is a highly overrated critic: narrow, incurious and priggish.

James Wood is one such critic, and to say he is one of the best contributors to the New Republic is not praise enough. Better to say that he reminds one of the New Republic when it was an honest magazine. Intelligent, thoughtful, morally serious, his collection does not show all his virtues. It does not include his witty evisceration of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, which demonstrates the difference between a flashy journalist and a real novelist. A great critic tries to remind us of the unaccountably neglected and the forgotten. The only essay here which does that is a fine one on the great Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. (Later essays on Giovanni Verga and Henry Green were written after this book was published.) Wood grew up in an English evangelical household and gradually lost his faith in God's existence. The nonconformist attitudes still remain though, with sometimes unhelpful results. An essay on Thomas More comes close to blaming him for not being a Protestant, and it is based on a dated Protestant historiography of the Reformation that has come under severe challenge from Eamon Duffy, Alexander Walsham and Christopher Haigh. This moralism leaks into his review of Morrison's Paradise, where he criticizes for being insufficiently judgmental.

But the one essay that is truly unforgivably flawed is "Half Against Flaubert." Wood castigates Flaubert for being heartless, unsympathetic, morally empty. That he could make these judgements without reference to Flaubert's "Three Tales" is absurd. It would be like discussing Tolstoy without reference to "The Death of Ivan Illych." Aside from insinuating that Flaubert is metaphorically guilty of the Catholic and monastic heresy of flagellation, Wood's criticisms of A Sentimental Education is singularly obtuse. He cites Henry James criticism, as if it were obvious that James was Flaubert's superior. "The only burning question of Sentimental Education is whether Frederic is going to have sex with his various lovers." No, the burning question is whether there is Frederic Moreau's life and anything in Orleanist and Second Empire France that can preserve him from being suffocated by a heartless conservative mediocrity. Reading this essay in the New Republic I was struck by the fact that this journal was one that looked like it has been edited by A Sentimental Education's cast. It certainaly has more of its share of Naive Moreaus, ruthlessly fashionably Roques, fanatical turncoat Seneschals and unsuccessful opportunistic Deslauriers. To say that Moreau is "bland" misses the point. Many people are, and many more are made that way by the world. At one point Wood praises the moral intelligence of Jane Austen and praises' James' creation of Gilbert Osmond as a truly evil character. In contrast to Flaubert, cannot one say that James and Austen rig the sentiments slightly? Would we feel that Osmond was so evil is he had not married someone as unusually beautiful and sensitive as Isabel Archer?

Otherwise, what we do have here are a collection of interesting and thoughtful essays. D.H. Lawrence is given a sympathetic hearing which helps counter the view that he drowned his gifts in a lunatic, misogynistic quasi-fascism. Gogol, Chekhov and Roth's Sabbath's Theatre are all intelligently appreciated. George Steiner, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison are all intelligently criticized, a virtue to be appreciated when many of Wood's colleagues at the New Republic and the New Criterion would simply castigate them for having opinions more liberal than Madeline Albright. For those who think John Updike can never be castigated enough, they will find witty confirmation from Wood. ("Sex exists for Updike as grass does, or the metallic sheen of an air-conditioning unit. This is not philosophical at all, but a rather boring paganism, which finds the same degree of sensuality in everything.")