James Wood (critic)

• 1. Introduction

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  James Douglas Graham Wood was born on the 1st of November 1965 in Durham, England, and by his mid-twenties he had made himself into one of the most argued-about literary critics writing in English. His father, Dennis William Wood, was a Dagenham-born minister and professor of zoology at Durham University. His mother, Sheila Graham Wood, was a schoolteacher from Scotland. From that household, Wood carried an upbringing he has described as austere and serious, shaped by an evangelical wing of the Church of England.

  He attended Durham Chorister School on a music scholarship, then moved to Eton College supported by a bursary tied to his parents' demonstrated financial need. At Jesus College, Cambridge, he graduated with a First in English Literature in 1988. What happened next was not the smooth entry into the literary establishment his credentials might have promised. He holed up in London in what he called a vile house in Herne Hill and started trying to make it as a reviewer.

  From that Herne Hill starting point, Wood would go on to coin terms that writers like Zadie Smith would argue with in print, earn the praise of Martin Amis and the contempt of Harold Bloom, and eventually hold a chair at Harvard while writing regularly for The New Yorker. The questions that drive this documentary: what does James Wood actually believe about fiction, how did his ideas spark such fierce debate, and why does the argument about his criticism matter beyond the pages of literary magazines?

• 2. The Young Critic

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  In 1990, Wood won Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards, just two years after leaving Cambridge. He had begun by reviewing books for The Guardian, and by 1991 he was serving as the paper's chief literary critic, a role he held through 1995. In 1994, he sat as a judge for the Booker Prize for fiction, placing himself at the center of British literary life while still in his late twenties.

  The move to the United States came in 1995, when Wood became a senior editor at The New Republic in Washington. He stayed in that role for twelve years, and during that time his reviews reached readers through The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, where he holds a seat on the editorial board. He and his wife, the novelist Claire Messud, are also on the editorial board of The Common, the literary magazine based at Amherst College.

  In 2007, Wood left The New Republic to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, a platform that gave his criticism a still wider reach. His teaching career began in an unusual setting: a class he co-taught with the late novelist Saul Bellow at Boston University. He later taught at Kenyon College in Ohio before joining Harvard University in September 2003, first as a Visiting Lecturer, then as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. In 2010-11, he held the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship of European Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.

• 3. Hysterical Realism

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  The phrase hysterical realism first appeared in Wood's writing to describe a specific kind of contemporary novel: long, ambitious, driven by manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions that pull away from the main story. Wood's argument was that such novels pursue vitality at all costs, and that the cost is often the reader's genuine engagement with individual lives on the page.

  Zadie Smith, whose novel White Teeth was among those Wood had in mind, responded in print. She called the term painfully accurate for the sort of overblown, manic prose she found in her own work, then immediately complicated the picture. Any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, she wrote, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna. She objected to grouping first-time novelists with literary giants, New York hipsters with Kilburn losers, and she argued that some of the writers caught in Wood's net were undeserving of the criticism.

  Smith's response is notable partly because it accepted the diagnosis while contesting the scope. That dynamic, in which writers acknowledge the force of Wood's observations even as they resist his conclusions, runs through much of the reception of his criticism. The debate over hysterical realism was not simply a disagreement about a handful of novels. It was an argument about what fiction is supposed to do, and how much plot and incident a novel can carry before it loses its grip on the human particular.

• 4. Realism and Its Stakes

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  Wood's book How Fiction Works, and particularly its final chapter, puts realism at the center of his entire critical project. He describes a chain of concerns that all collapse into one another: free indirect style leads to point of view, which leads to the perception of detail, which leads to character, which leads to what he calls the real, the thing at the bottom of all his inquiries.

  Flaubert stands at the origin of this tradition as Wood understands it. His formulation is direct: novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him. What Flaubert decisively established, in Wood's account, is modern realist narration. The telling and brilliant detail; a high degree of visual noticing; an unsentimental composure; the capacity to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; a neutral judgment of good and bad; and a pursuit of truth even at the cost of repelling the reader. Wood grants that traces of this practice can be found in Defoe, Austen, and Balzac, but argues that all of it together is not present until Flaubert.

  Alongside hysterical realism, Wood coined a second term, commercial realism, which he associates specifically with Graham Greene and with Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter. Commercial realism, as Wood defines it, is an attention to the minutiae of daily life, taking in elements of the everyday that matter precisely because of their apparent lack of importance. He argues this style captures reality by holding the banal and the interesting in the same frame, refusing to select only for drama.

  In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Wood explained his core position in plain terms: the novel exists to be affecting, to shake the reader profoundly. To be rigorous about feeling, in his view, is to honor what the novel is for. The reader's proper approach, he argued, is the approach of a writer, which means making aesthetic judgments rather than ideological ones.

• 5. Admirers and Antagonists

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  Adam Begley, writing in the Financial Times, called Wood the best literary critic of his generation. Martin Amis described him as a marvellous critic, one of the few remaining. Christopher Hitchens, himself a prominent book reviewer and journalist, was openly fond of Wood's work. In one instance Hitchens gave his students a copy of Wood's review of John Updike's novel Terrorist, telling them it was far better than his own review of the same book.

  The editors of n+1 took a sharply different position. In the journal's 2004 issue they wrote that Wood possessed a talent, but an odd one, narrow, with an aesthetician's interests and idiosyncratic tastes. Their critique extended to The New Republic itself, and they suggested that in a different literary environment Wood's enterprise would have seemed less essentially parodic. Wood replied in the Fall 2005 issue of n+1, pointing out what he called the editors' hypocrisy: their attack on negative book reviews was itself a wholly negative attack on negativity. He quoted the magazine's own pages back at the editors, including a line written by editor Keith Gessen on the final page of the same issue, "It is time to say what you mean," and asked, pointedly, what exactly they did mean. The n+1 editors responded in the subsequent issue with a roundtable on contemporary literature and criticism.

  Harold Bloom's relationship with Wood passed through a full reversal. On the publication of Wood's first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, Bloom wrote that Wood was an authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time. By 2008, in an interview with Vice magazine, Bloom was saying something entirely different. He told the interviewer not to mention Wood at all, saying Wood simply does not exist. He described criticism that does not endure as period pieces, adding that the wind blows and they will go away. Bloom also mentioned that Wood had written a vicious review of him in The New Republic, and that a publisher had offered to send him Wood's book, which Bloom declined, saying he didn't want to have to throw it out.