The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief By James Wood Cape 318pp, £16.99 in UK
James Wood inspires more fear and loathing among his fellow-countrymen in the literary world than any other critic at work in the language today. I have known eminent English novelists to spit at the mere mention of his name. He is a young man - born in 1965 - but already he has acquired a wide reputation as by far the fiercest - some would say cruellest - most daring and intelligent literary commentator of what Harold Bloom calls "this bad time". Dust-jacket recommendations are never as impressive as publishers seem to think they are, but the encomiums for The Broken Estate, from Bloom, from Susan Sontag, Tom Paulin, Cynthia Ozick, Janet Malcolm, amount practically to an older generation's nomination of Wood as their coming man - though from the evidence of the pieces collected here, he has already triumphantly arrived. These days, much of what passes for criticism - read: book reviewing - is hack work produced by academics to supplement their university salaries, or by novelists or poets bent on puffing their friends and skewering their enemies. Wood, however, is that rare thing, a professional, full-time literary critic. He has written for the Guardian, for the New York Review of Books and its London sister, and the Washington-based New Republic, where he publishes regularly. More remarkable even than his professional independence is his profound concern with spirituality. He was brought up among evangelical Christians; in a beautiful phrase, one among many such in this book, he speaks of his childhood as "the noise around a hush, the hush of God". Although he lost his faith in his teenage years, he retains the passion and dedication of a believer; in his work the word "miraculous" appears with suspicious frequency.
In his introduction to The Broken Estate, he remarks of Virginia Woolf that "For her the novel acts religiously but performs sceptically," and expresses the hope that his own essays may do something similar. Later, in an extended piece on Woolf, he speaks of her poetically metaphorical style which is "a language of forceful hesitation. Its force lies in the vigour and originality of Woolf's metaphors; its hesitation lies in its admission that, in criticism, the language of pure summation does not exist"; this could serve as a fair description of Wood's own literary method. The "estate" to which the title of his book refers is "the supposition that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports . . ." It was broken, Wood insists, at about the mid-point of the 19th century, when the novel was at its strongest, and the Gospels began to be read, "by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales - as a kind of novel", while simultaneously, writers such as Flaubert began to turn literary style into a religion. This reversal, according to Wood, was good neither for religion nor for the novel. Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan - author of Vie de Jesus - loosed Christianity's claim to Truth and turned religion into "a comforting poetry . . . or an empty moralism", while the novel, "having founded the religion of itself, relaxed too gently into aestheticism".
Underlying all the essays in this book is the unfashionable conviction that belief matters, and that "distinctions between literary belief and religious belief are important". Unlike religion, fiction "moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie . . . Belief in fiction is always belief `as if'." He quotes Thomas Mann, one of the shrewdest and most sceptical commentators on the novelist's art, to the effect that for the artist, "new experiences of `truth' are new incentives to the game, new possibilities of expression, no more". This does not, Mann insists, imply an absence of seriousness, for the artist "is very serious, serious even to tears - but yet not quite - and by consequence, not at all. His artistic seriousness is of an absolute nature, it is `dead-earnest playing'." In these essays, especially the ones on Melville, Chekhov, Woolf, Mann, D.H. Lawrence and John Updike, Wood engages in deep and stimulating debate on what might be called the secular spiritualism offered by fiction. Yet he is also a close reader of genius. So good is he in identifying the strengths of his subjects, so illuminating and exciting and compelling, that even when one disagrees with his taste one never doubts the soundness of his judgments; he has managed to convince me to have another go at what to me are the insipid vapourings of Virginia Woolf, and the hobbled choreography of Jane Austen's mating dances; why, I might even take another crack at D.H. Lawrence.
He is also a great anathematiser. The pieces here on George Steiner and Julian Barnes are excoriating. Although there is sometimes the impression that he makes hard work of soft targets, there is an undeniable thrill in hearing him indignantly point out the nakedness of more than one emperor. Here he is on Steiner: "George Steiner's prose is a remarkable substance; it is the sweat of a monument. Readers of his essays will be familiar with its imprecisions and melodramas; the platoon-like massing of its adjectives, its cathedral hush around the great works." And that's just for openers. He has his weaknesses, of course, and his susceptibility to false messiahs. He recalls a television discussion between Steiner and Joseph Brodsky, in which Steiner "set out his anti-democratic stall", holding that art flourishes best under totalitarian systems. In reply, "with thick dignity", Brodsky said: "Yes, but liberty is the greatest masterpiece." Collapse, according to Wood, of stout party. But what does Brodsky's gnomic riposte actually mean? Whose masterpiece? What liberty? To me, the passage only serves to illustrate the gullibility of Western critics when it comes to the Great Russian Soul.
Wood's first sentences are all arresting; he does like to begin with a bang: "When it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires"; "It is hard not to resent Flaubert for making fictional prose stylish . . ."; "For much of this century, English literature has been at furtive war with its American pretender"; "To call Under- world, Don DeLillo's large novel, a failure might seem an act of slightly flirtatious irrelevance." One could go on. He is a master of the tersely beautiful phrase rather than the rolling period: "Lawrence savours the way in which language at its densest becomes its own medium, like night"; of an "unstable" book on Eliot's anti-Semitism, "reading it is like watching a maniac trying to calm a hysteric". There is wonderful writing throughout this collection, by turns luscious and muscular, committed and disdaining, passionate and minutely considered. The short piece on his religious upbringing and his time as a boy chorister at Durham shows what a fine novelist he might be. Yet one dearly hopes that he is not considering even a temporary move to fiction; the loss to criticism, in "this bad time", would be too great.