James Wood: Inhabiting the Text

In the First Person

Afonso Dias Ramos

Widely considered to be the most renowned, dominant and feared literary critic of the last decades, James Wood discusses the different stages of an intellectual journey that has taken him from a religious education in Britain to the most prestigious positions in the American literary world, as a book critic for The New Yorker magazine, a professor at Harvard University, and the author of award-winning novels and essays. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, James Wood reflects on his life and work as a reader, critic, professor and writer.

James Wood is widely acclaimed as the leading literary critic in the Anglo- -American world. Born in 1965, in Durham, UK, he studied at Eton with a scholarship in music and at Cambridge. Currently, Wood is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker. He was the chief literary critic at The Guardian and a senior editor at The New Republic. His essays and reviews regularly appear in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books. James Wood inspires more fear and loathing in the English literary world than any other critic at work today. Once called the ‘elegant assassin’ by Boston Globe and a ‘courtly eviscerator’ by n+1, he is generally considered to be the most feared man in American letters, renowned for his brutally direct reviews that were a trademark of his early career. This reputation owes to scathing essays that range anywhere from the dismantling of Paul Auster’s hypermasculine swagger to the indictment of John Updike’s intellectual slackness, from the critical takedown of popular writers, such as Toni Morrison, Julian Barnes and Jonathan Franzen, to the searing analysis of the encyclopedic novels by Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace as a ‘hysterical realism’, which is to say an obsession with the noise of the topical and with prolonged digressions in order to avoid silence, character, and reflection.

At a time when criticism seems to have been reduced to book reviews done as hack work by academics or would-be writers puffing up their friends and sneering at their enemies, James Wood is a rare thing: a professional full-time literary critic. This is not the only reason why he appears to come from another era. Advocating an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism, his models are not Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, but Edmund Wilson, Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, and the novel is held out to be a secular form of scripture that emerged as the distinctions between religious and literary belief began to blur. As writers and theologians started to look at the Gospels as fictional tales — no longer prized as literal truth, but as poetic imagination and moral edification — novelists turned literature into a quasi-religion. That is why ‘novelists’, Wood argues, ‘should thank Flaubert like poets thank spring’. These insightful elucidations have yielded essays on canonical writers (Melville, Chekhov, Cervantes) and recent legends (W.G. Sebald, Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole), which have been held out as a standard for informed and insightful appreciation, promoting a slow-motion approach wrapped in a distinctive literary style of their own. Lately, Wood has been more of a populariser, credited with bringing Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Ben Lerner — and, with them, the hybrid essayistic style now often called ‘autofiction’ — to wider public attention. With three decades of literary criticism under his belt, Wood has no shortage of detractors, and the knives were certainly waiting for his own novels. But nonetheless, these books did secure a great deal of critical attention. At the same time, a number of writers have publicly acknowledged their profound appreciation for his reviews, for being attuned to deep resonances and currents in books that even the authors were unaware of, which in some cases, such as Zadie Smith’s, has even led them to change their own approach. Martin Amis, for instance, described him as ‘a marvellous critic, one of the few remaining’. Cynthia Ozick declared that ‘James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity.’ Long hailed by Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens as something of a successor, no other critic alive today holds the same level of prominence and influence, scrutiny and antagonism. Wood’s critical essays have been collected in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004), The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays (2012), and recently, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019 (2019). In 2000, he received the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2009 he won the National Magazine Award for Criticism. He has authored two acclaimed novels, The Book Against God (2003) and Upstate (2018), as well as a study of novelistic techniques, How Fiction Works (2008). James Wood has talked to Electra about his life and his work, in a series of reflections on thirty years of reviewing, teaching, writing and thinking about books.

Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm, c. 1850
© Photo: Scala, Florence / bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian, 1566
© Photo: Scala, Florence / Album

AFONSO DIAS RAMOS You started publishing book reviews at a very young age and became the chief literary critic for The Guardian in your mid-twenties. What drew you towards literary criticism?

JAMES WOOD I started reading essays and reviews when I was a teenager – the essays of George Orwell and Virginia Woolf made a great impression. And in those days (the late 1980s and early 1990s), London was full of newspapers, each of which had ample books pages. There was also a lot of really great and lively rock criticism. I knew I wanted to write about literature. The question I faced at 21 was: do I do this inside the academy (start a PhD, aim for a teaching job), or outside it? There has always been something very appealing to me in the idea of writing to earn a living, and writing for a non-academic audience.

ADR Was being a novelist always an ambition? What made you finally take the leap?

JW I tried at various times, in my teens and twenties, to write a novel, and each time I failed. Finally, in my early 30s, I had a small window: our first child was on the way, and the arrival of the baby was the obvious deadline.

ADR You have stated that literature gave you freedom to think during your religious upbringing. Indeed, the issue of transcendence pervades your entire work. Did you ever have the sense of writing becoming a substitute for religion? Or that the mission of the critic ought to be like that of the evangelist?

JW I think T. S. Eliot is right when he says that nothing should be a substitute for anything else. Literature doesn’t need to be, and shouldn’t be, a substitute for religion. Literature is literature. Literature didn’t fill a religious hole in my life, because I wasn’t ever really any kind of religious believer. On the contrary, literature allowed me to escape from religion’s narrowness. But of course, having grown up in a religious (Christian) household, I am very much the creature and inheritor of religious impulses. I find Jesus, in this regard, a contradictory figure. On the one hand, the Jesus who says that any man who looks upon a woman with desire in his heart is an adulterer, is the enemy of free thought, a kind of totalitarian mind-controller, and anti-novelist; on the other hand, the Jesus who tells the men who have caught a woman in adultery and who are about to stone her to death, ‘let he who is without sin throw the first stone,’ is a great instinctive novelist, because he understands that everyone is flawed and weak, and sympathises with our weakness. By the way, Slavoj Zizek has a great joke concerning this episode in the New Testament. Jesus tells the crowd ‘let he who is without sin throw the first stone’, and feels a pebble hit his face. He turns to see who threw the stone: ‘Mother, what are you doing here?’

ADR As a young critic, you built quite a reputation for raising the bar high and slaying writers. In retrospect, do you hold any lingering regrets in this respect?

JW Yes, I wish I had been much kinder and more understanding. Who gives a shit about one particular novel or one particular review of that novel? But causing sadness in someone’s life can’t always be erased.

ADR Has the experience of becoming a novelist and being reviewed changed this? If so, in what ways?

JW Yes, indeed. Actually, I’d say that it’s not so much the experience of being reviewed myself, as the fact that I live with a novelist (Claire Messud), and seeing her get sad when she receives a stupid or hostile review is painful. Who wants to bring pain into a house like that? So I’m gentler than I used to be. In the old days, I deliberately blocked thinking about the person being reviewed; now I can’t help thinking of that person, that human being, reading my words.

ADR When it comes to the writing process, do reviews and novels fall on completely different ends of the spectrum? Do they not interfere with each other in some way?

JW Perhaps they do, but surely the novelist, while writing a novel, is always self-critical, is always revising and editing, weighing and judging his or her own work? So the creative writer is always being a critic, at least of his own work – you have to be. In this sense, the implied opposition, between the sublimely unconscious novelist and the overly self-conscious reviewer, may be mythical. These writerly acts are closer together than they might seem.

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