The four essays in this brief but illuminating book of memoir and criticism started out as lectures. That they have been collected and published and trussed up as a new release without further price-justifying padding says less about the state of publishing and more about James Wood’s standing as our pre-eminent literary critic.
Granted, a fourth volume of essays on individual authors would have been more welcome, as would a follow-up to Wood's gem-like primer on literature, How Fiction Works (2012); however, The Nearest Thing to Life is a comfortable halfway house, a more than adequate compromise, proving that whether in short form or long, printed or spoken word, Wood is a voice worth listening to.
His first essay, entitled “Why?”, uses personal anecdote as a springboard to discussing and dissecting literature. Wood begins with an account of attending a funeral and then takes us even further back to his upbringing in a starchily intellectual and religious household in the north of England. The Why? question – why do we live and why do we die? – was an acute one in Wood’s scripture-saturated childhood and has reappeared in recent years as friends and family have passed away.
Then and now, literature has been a means of escape from contemplating his own mortality, the novel being “a garden where the great Why? hangs unpicked, gloating in the free air”. Books, for the young and enthralled Wood, were full of free space where anything could be thought or uttered; fiction could be “riotously anti-clerical” and “gloriously erotic”.
The third essay here, "Using Everything", sees Wood ransacking his childhood again, this time dilating on the book that had the profoundest impact on him while growing up – not the Bible or The Hobbit but a book called Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction. Wood reappraises it in the clear light of adulthood, mocking its encyclopaedic breadth (its "crazily comprehensive hospitality") and its obsession with rating and grading authors, but also extolling its "sweet, radical innocence" and its attempts, however misguided or incoherent, to pin down literary greatness.
If this essay had been merely a wry commentary on a cranky book then our enthusiasm would have petered out after a couple of pages. Instead, after poking fun at the book and laying bare his wide-eyed adolescent affection for it, Wood moves on to evaluate the changing nature of the writer-critic over the years – criticism, Wood says, that is “situated in the world, not behind scholarly walls”.
It is the final essay that draws most upon personal recollection and predicament, and as such it is the one that brings us closer to Wood the man than Wood the critic. It was originally delivered as a lecture at the British Museum in 2014 and then appeared in the London Review of Books under the title On Not Going Home. Here it is rechristened as the slightly portentous "Secular Homelessness", which has echoes of "secular forgetting" in the first essay, a term Wood devises to describe life overruling death in the novel. In this last essay, Wood movingly recounts how living and working in America for 20 years has made him simultaneously hanker for England and feel so displaced and disconnected that he is unable to return. A "light veil of alienation" continues to shroud both his adopted land and the one he has left behind. "I have made a home in the United States, but it is not quite Home."
Wood opens with the big perplexing question which at some point affects us all – Why? – and concludes with one now privately troubling him: where, exactly, is Home? Literature is brought in to illustrate and corroborate, with Wood’s many examples showing fictional characters as fellow sufferers, worriers and strugglers. Fiction, Wood argues, is able to home in on individual concerns but also pan out to depict whole stories. The novel gives us “formal insight into the shape of someone’s life: we can see the beginning and end of many fictional lives; their developments and errors; stasis and drift.”
Three fictional works are expounded on at length. For Wood, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower is "one of the most beautiful enactments of the great Why?" while W G Sebald's The Emigrants, which underscores Wood's last essay, evinces the German author's "touchingly estranged, unhoused" language. An expert breakdown of Chekhov's short story The Kiss serves as the lead-in to Wood's second and best essay here, "Serious Noticing". Chekhov's "remarkable" tale demonstrates that stories, though fashioned with a finite beginning and end, are in fact bottomless. "Stories produce offspring," Wood says, "genetic splinters of themselves, hapless embodiments of their original inability to tell the whole tale."
Throughout his criticism Wood has lauded Chekhov as a standard-bearer for realism. Here he commends him for being a serious noticer, a writer who "appears to notice everything". Wood lavishes the same praise on V S Naipaul in an essay in The Fun Stuff: Naipaul is "the brilliant noticer, the committed world-gatherer". It takes one to know one: Wood, a serious noticer himself, starts by exemplifying Chekhov's eye for detail before enumerating equally impressive instances from a range of writers that include other perennial favourite Saul Bellow (a writer described, coincidentally, by his current biographer, Zachary Leader, as "a famed noticer"). For Wood, details aren't merely decorative: "The details are the stories; stories in miniature."
All the essays in The Nearest Thing to Life trace the connections between literature and life and reveal as much about stages on Wood's own journey as they do about his reading tastes and modes of analysis. One of his talents is his ability to show us more than one facet, exposing dichotomies, parallels and contradictions we never imagined were there. Detail, he explains, "is both intensely self-conscious and intensely self-annulling". Reading a novel is to feel the tension between secular instance and religious form. He makes a fascinating distinction between literary critics who go the extra mile and write "through" a book and those who simply write "about" it. Wood only disappoints with his silly neologism "homelooseness", which he coins to contrast with secular homelessness. The argument works but buckles under the strain of the forced terminology.
Wood's elaborate language is his calling card, the standout feature that distinguishes him from his peers. Put another way, if Wood wrote anonymously he would quickly be rumbled. In a London Review of Books piece on A S Byatt we hear that her fictive worlds are "bristling with diligence". In a New Yorker essay on Elena Ferrante he tells us her novels "seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader". Some readers marvel at his colourful prose, others, well, bristle at it. In this collection we get the usual high-flung formulations ("stunned truancy") along with metaphors that veer from the cloyingly overwrought (literature "makes us insomniacs in the halls of habit") to the elegantly simple ("the novel is the great trader in the shares of the ordinary").
At times Wood states the obvious, pointlessly asserting that characters who die in historical novels do so "as fictional characters not historical personages" – or that characters don't actually die on the page, they are reborn with successive readings. Also, those familiar with Wood's criticism will be able to trace reverberations: Thomas Mann's idea of fiction being a matter of "not quite" is recycled from Wood's essay on Mann in The Broken Estate; and Wood's clumps of autobiographical detail (Durham, boarding school, chorister, religious indoctrination) appear in scattered fragments throughout past essays.
But hearing Wood repeat himself is a small price to pay when he writes and argues so persuasively. As ever, he gets to the nub of an issue by way of rigorous close readings, an expansive knowledge of secondary texts, and fearless questioning and relentless probing. We read this collection and once again come a little closer to discovering how fiction works, and even closer than before to discovering how James Wood works.
Malcolm Forbes is a regular contributor to The Review.
thereview@thenational.ae
