Criticism with a conscience stirs the passions

James Wood

Jonathan Cape, 16.99

JAMES W WOOD

A CLUE to the seriousness of James Wood’s engagement with the novel comes not from the introduction to his brilliant second collection of essays, but from the acknowledgements. Before the thanks begin, he writes that this book is "about the secular and comic nature of modern fiction", and hopes it may be seen as "the secular reply to the more religious proposals of [his first volume] The Broken Estate".

Few critics now writing in English would make this kind of remark, for fear of being thought too high-falutin. But this is the key to Wood’s success: he cares more passionately about the novel than any other contemporary critic.

This passion allows him to dismiss Salman Rushdie’s overblown Fury as a "Nobu novel", so obsessed with proving its hipness that plot and plausibility vanish; he attacks modern novelists in ‘Hysterical Realism’ for their "features mistaken for scenes... the evidence of vitality mistaken for the drama of vitality".

Wood can be remarkably brave, and is always unremittingly intelligent, writing that, "an aesthetics without any faith in either morality or the arguability of aesthetic distinction… is a starved one". This is the kind of criticism that readers who care about good writing will want to read, not just for the thought, but for the sheer pleasures of Wood’s phrase-making. Bohumil Hrabal’s poems "quickly square their shoulders and become paragraphs", and the modern novel offers us a "dramatic corrugation" of ideas, in an essay on JM Coetzee’s Disgrace.

To borrow Wood’s talent for assertion, no book worth reading is without its flaws, and the very seriousness of Wood’s critical bent can, at times, obscure his sharp analysis. In the introduction, the lengthy exegesis of an unfunny joke by Ian Hamilton is accompanied by citations from an average of five authors per page. For the less well read, Wood’s prose occasionally feels like being given a first piano lesson by Stockhausen.

The same assumptions about his readers’ level of reading can threaten Wood’s arguments: "the world of the slap - everyone knows this is Dostoevsky’s world…" - well, everyone who has read Dostoevsky as thoroughly as Wood, perhaps. But this is a small price for the acuity of his insights, for example, into Henry Green’s Living, and his wry observations on the modern literary scene: "anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be brilliance on the move."

Nearly all these pieces deal with the interplay between the comic and the tragic in fiction, something Wood calls "the irresponsible self". In this kind of tragi-comedy, accepted relationships between self and other, between the usual and unusual, are displaced, creating a distance in which Wood finds both laughter and pity.

Full of witty aperus, and a delight to read, one only wishes that Wood had gone further in his investigations. Does modern writing have a "tragi-comic" view of the world, in which comedy’s openness and potency blend with tragedy’s dark sense of fatedness? Read this book and wonder.

James W Wood (no relation) is a poet