The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief ... (ISBN 0375752633)

Amazon.com Review:
For James Wood, great fiction is always a venture into danger--a journey to the farthest shores. By extension, great criticism too should demand and risk all. And his first collection, The Broken Estate, does so again and again. Since Wood graduated from Cambridge in the 1980s and began reviewing for The Guardian, his name has been preceded by phrases such as enfant terrible and followed by adjectives such as fierce, fearless, and occasionally far worse. Few critics have such an urgent relation to their reading, and it is this, combined with his all-encompassing intellect and verbal velvet, that makes Wood so terrifying--and so tender. In his introduction to The Broken Estate he writes, "The gentle request to believe is what makes fiction so moving" (gentle, as both adjective and verb, and its adverbial form, seem key terms), and this is what Wood is drawn to explore in the Russian greats and the English, European, and American moderns, among others. Many of these essays originally appeared in the London Review of Books and The New Republic, where he is a senior editor, but his book is far from a bundle of accident. Wood's contention is that in the mid-19th century, the "distinctions between literary belief and religious belief" began to blur (or, depending on the writer, shimmer), causing a crisis for the likes of Melville, Gogol, and Flaubert, and leading to "a skepticism toward the real as we encounter it in the narrative." I suspect, however, that some will head straight for the pieces on their literary loves and not be so concerned with Wood's overarching thesis, at least initially. No matter. Each essay also stands on its own, whether the author is positing Jane Austen as "a ferocious innovator" more radical than Flaubert, Melville as the ultimate linguistic spendthrift, or Gogol as "a defensive fantasist." In a brilliant take on Virginia Woolf--Wood makes even the much-discussed new--he declares (admits?) that "the writer-critic, wanting to be both faithful critic and original writer," is caught "in a flurry of trapped loyalties." But he himself almost always works his way out of such snares, one of the many joys of this book. In his analysis of the several sides of Thomas More, for example, Wood first reads Utopia as a comedy but then suggests we read it "more tragically--not as a Lucianic satire but as a darkly ironic vision of the impossible." The aphorisms and aperçus come thick and strong. (Keepers of commonplace books should start a separate volume just for Wood.) For example, "Leslie Stephen acted like a genius but he thought like a merely gifted man." Or, "Hemingway has a reputation as a cold master of repetition, an icicle formed from the drip of style, while Lawrence is most often seen as a hothead who fell over himself, verbally." And he also has a gift for the telling domestic detail: Gogol "irritated others by playing card games he had invented and then changing the rules during play. He became rather selfishly involved with undercooked macaroni cheese, a dish he made again and again for guests." But Wood will dislike being complimented on his sentences as much as he claims Woolf did. His art, too, must be measured in chapters. Wood is a great lover, and this makes him if not a great hater then one who gets hot under the critical collar, his ardor turning to irritation and intemperance in pieces on Morrison, Pynchon, and Murdoch. But in his finest discussions--among them one on Chekhov and another on late-20th-century treasure W.G. Sebald--he instantly quickens writers, books, and readers into being. --Kerry Fried

Portrait of the critic as a young moralist:
Whatever happened to the tradition of morally serious criticism most famously exemplified by F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling? What happened to those critics whose essays exemplified what Joseph Epstein has called "gravity"? Well, in Epstein's case he succumbed to the malevolent ideological miasma of Norman Podhoretz's Commentary. Leavis' influence declined as a result of his parochialism, his narrow concentration on a few English writers, and his rather hostile and paranoid attitude towards criticism. As academics concentrated more and more on trying to define what literature, many of the forums for the public intellectual took an increasingly hysterical and demagogic attitude towards modern literary theory. Given the New York Review of Books' notorious reluctance to attract new talent, and the ideological prejudices of the American right, where is a new critic going to come from? 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.")

Highly Overrated:
This is literary criticism for people who don't like to read fiction. Or rather, for people who read novels just to squeeze them for big, important, gloomy ideas: alienation, the madness of being, the meaninglessness of world without God, and so on. 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.

repetitive to say...but brilliant:
Criticism for people who want to read something smart and insightful about books. It's a book for those who appreciate thinking long and deep about literature, who appreciate being introduced to aspects of language and content they may never have previously considered, who take literature seriously and feel no need to apologize for it. There simply is no critic writing today as consistently well about literature as Mr. Wood and this book is a perfect introduction to why he has acquired such a reputation at such a comparatively young age. You may find yourself disagreeing but you will be forced to think hard as to why.

Brilliant Criticism:
James Wood takes up the question of the novel and faith in this excellent collection of essays. Perhaps more philosophical here than usual, Wood still demonstrates why he is the most insightful and eloquent commentator of fiction. His criticisms of Morrison, Pynchon, and Dellilo encapsulate what is so often wrong with contemporary American fiction. The American novel has unfortunately descended into a lumping amalgam of ostentatious allegories and social commentaries. Our most esteemed writers seem to have lost touch with the basic elements that make great fiction tick: character, description, mystery. On the other hand, Wood reserves kind words for truly fine novelists like Henry Green and Iris Murdoch; he also makes decidedly uncontroversial appraisals of Gogol, Hamsun, Melville, and Austin. He is more critical of Flaubert than usual, drawing out what he perceives to be some of the problems of realism in a great work like 'A Sentimental Education.' James Wood is always interesting and erudite. 'The Broken Estate' is an enormously accomplished collection of criticism.

writers on writing:
not what i was hoping for in a work of fiction criticism. 'meaty' reading and hard going, but i am persistant. very fine prose composition & worth the effort.