Green, Daniel. "Life on the Page." OPEN LETTERS MONTHLY (August 2008).

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

The limitations of James Wood’s How Fiction Works become evident in just its first few pages. In his Introduction, Wood tells us that although he admires the critics Victor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes, among their deficiencies was their failure to write as if they expected “to be read and comprehended by any kind of common reader,” a mistake that Wood himself presumably will not make. (“Mindful of the common reader,” he writes a little later, “I have tried to reduce what Joyce calls ‘the true scholastic stink’ to bearable levels.”) But exactly who, or what, is the “common reader”? Is it the reader who keeps up on all the latest mystery novels? Who these days prefers memoir to fiction? Who might be led to read literary fiction if it could be made rather less literary? More to the point, does any kind of common reader turn to highbrow French or Russian literary critics for help with their reading strategies in the first place? Even if we were to concede the existence of large numbers of enthusiastic readers just waiting for the right literary critic to come along and illuminate the deeper mysteries of fiction for them, Wood’s book surely would not perform this task. How Fiction Works is no more free of a constricted perspective and of “specialized” discourse than A Theory of Prose or S/Z. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/august08-how-fiction-works/.

Taylor, D. J. "Review of HOW FICTION WORKS, by James Wood." THE INDEPENDENT February 3, 2008.

Whatever one may think about James Wood's constant ejaculations, his ceremonious name-dropping ("W G Sebald once said to me...") and his lecture-hall mannerisms – more of these in a moment – he really is an A-grade exponent of what university syllabi used to call "practical criticism". Some of the best bits of this brief but luminous primer – and they are very good indeed – come when Wood strips the engine of some fabled fictional juggernaut down to its component parts with the aim of establishing just how a piece of prose works to bring off its effects, the way in which, as he puts it, a novel "teaches us how to read its narrator". . . . Read the rest here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/how-fiction-works-by-james-wood-776499.html.

Anderson, Sam. "How James Wood's HOW FICTION WORKS Works." NEW YORK MAGAZINE August 3, 2008.

Literary critics are, above all, literary characters: verbal constructs that posture as human beings in order to sell some more or less persuasive story. You might say, in fact—if you’re in an old-fashioned, paradoxical mood—that critics are the very apotheosis of literary character, since they are characters formed entirely out of characterizations of other characters. Over the past two decades, James Wood has established himself as one of the strangest, most vivid critical characters on the scene. He’s been, by now, pretty much universally acknowledged—grudgingly, fawningly, eagerly, nervously, warningly, or mockingly, depending on which journals you subscribe to—as the best book critic currently classing up the back end of America’s magazines. (After writing for The New Republic for twelve years, he moved last summer to The New Yorker.) His strengths leave very little room to dispute this supremacy. In fact, one of the many ironies that flock around Wood is that it would probably take Wood himself—a world-class praiser who is rarely wrong about authors he loves—to adequately catalogue the many pleasures of reading James Wood. He reads widely, deeply, fully, and closely; he extracts gallons of meaning from tiny dewdrops of text; his sentences (especially his metaphors) regularly outperform the book he’s reviewing; and he transmits his enthusiasms so stirringly it’s practically a form of intellectual erotica. But, like many public figures who are so reliably excellent they risk monotony, Wood is saved from his abilities by his fascinating limitations. . . . Read the rest here: http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/48933/.

Wood, James. "Wounder and Wounded." NEW YORKER December 1, 2008.

French, Patrick. The World is What It is: the Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul. London: Picador, 2008. The Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy writes of the two voices in Kipling, which have been called the saxophone and the oboe. The first is the hard, militaristic, imperialist writer, and the second is the Kipling infused with Indianness, with admiration for the subcontinent’s cultures. Naipaul has a saxophone and an oboe, too, a hard sound and a softer one. These two sides could be called the Wounder and the Wounded. The Wounder is by now well known—the source of fascinated hatred in the literary world and postcolonial academic studies. He disdains the country he came from: “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake.” When he won the Nobel Prize, in 2001, he said it was “a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors.” Asked why he had omitted Trinidad, he said that he feared it would “encumber the tribute.” He has written of the “barbarism” and “primitivism” of African societies, and has fixated, when writing about India, on public defecation. (“They defecate on the hills; they defecate on the riverbanks; they defecate on the streets.”) When asked for his favorite writers, he replies, “My father.” He is socially successful but deliberately friendless, an empire of one: “At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.” The Wounder, we learn from Patrick French’s extraordinary biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is (Knopf; $30), used and used up his first wife, Patricia Hale, sometimes depending on her, at other times ignoring her, often berating and humiliating her. And French’s biography, published earlier this year in Britain, is already notorious for a revelation that can only enrich our luxury of loathing: in 1972, Naipaul began a long, tortured, sadomasochistic affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman, Margaret Gooding. It was an intensely sexual relationship, which enacted, on Naipaul’s side, fantasies of cruelty and domination. On one occasion, jealous because Margaret was with another man, he said that he was “very violent with her for two days with my hand. . . . Her face was bad. She couldn’t really appear in public.” The Wounded Naipaul is the writer who returns obsessively to the struggle, shame, and impoverished fragility of his early life in Trinidad; to the unlikely journey he made from the colonial rim of the British Empire to its metropolitan center; and to the precariousness, as he sees it, of his long life in England—“a stranger here, with the nerves of the stranger,” as he puts it in The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Again and again, his sense of aggrieved encirclement expands to encompass others, and he manages, with neither vanity nor condescension, to blend his woundedness with theirs: the empire of one is colonized by his characters. They range from the major to the minor, from the educated to the almost illiterate, from the real to the fictional, but they are united by their homelessness. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/12/01/081201crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all.

Conrad, Peter. "Celebrate the Force of Fiction: Review of Wood's HOW FICTION WORKS." OBSERVER February 17, 2008.

James Wood, once a Guardian book reviewer, is now professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard. Despite its clunkily repeated preposition, the latter job description spells out a defiant faith in practice as opposed to theory. The theorists who used to be so academically modish had little knowledge of literature and even less love for it. The aim of their endeavours was to dispense with what they criticised, since literature was at best the residue of a false consciousness, a tissue of oppressive untruths overdue for demolition. Wood, proud to be a practitioner, rebukes such arrogant scepticism. Even Barthes, whom he admires, is accused of possessing a 'sensitive, murderous' contempt for fictional realism and the reality it upholds. 'Alienated from creative instinct', such critics vilify a bright, illuminating energy they cannot share. Wood is not of their number. By examining the minutiae of character, narrative and style in a range of fictional works that starts with the Bible and ends with Coetzee and Pynchon, he fondly and delicately pieces back together what the deconstructors put asunder. This is, as its humdrum title proclaims, a manual, an exploration of writerly craft. Though it deftly reveals how fiction works, its secret ambitions are grander. 'How to push out?' asks Wood at one point, investigating the way novelists magically induce static figures to move and take on independent life. With simple, beautiful precision, his question sums up his credo: the novelists he most admires, Austen and Woolf, James and Bellow among them, bravely launch themselves into deep waters, relying on the momentary inventiveness of language to animate the worlds they are inventing. They do not take an inventory of things that already exist; like God, they make reality up as they go along, ecstatically improvising. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/feb/17/fiction.reviews.

Deresiewicz, William. "How Wood Works: the Riches and Limits of James Wood." THE NATION November 19, 2008.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. It has been decided of late that the face of literary criticism shall belong to James Wood. A writer first at the Guardian (from 1992 to 1996), then at The New Republic and now, since last year, at The New Yorker, Wood has long been considered, in a formulation that soon assumed a ritual cast, "the best critic of his generation." Coming from elders like Sontag, Bloom and Saul Bellow, and nearly always incorporating that meaningless word "generation," these consecrations have bespoken a kind of Oedipal conflict, betraying the double urge first to possess one's offspring by defining them, then to destroy them altogether. For Wood has come to be seen as something more than the best of his generation: not just the best, full stop, regardless of generation, but the one, the only, even the last. Beside him, none; after him, none other. The line ends here. Contributing to this mythology is a belief in cultural decline, as constitutive a feature of modern consciousness as its reciprocal faith, a belief in material progress. Cynthia Ozick recently called for a "thicket of Woods," a battalion of critics raised in Wood's image, to renovate not only literary criticism but literature itself. Wood is the "template," Ozick announced, from which a new cultural "infrastructure" must be built--or rebuilt. For Ozick, Wood recalls the glory days of American criticism during the middle of the last century, the age of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. Indeed, he may surpass these forebears. "We have not heard a critical mind like this at work," Ozick declared, "since Trilling's The Liberal Imagination." The Liberal Imagination was published in 1950. Everything since includes some of Wilson, most of Trilling himself and nearly all of Kazin and Howe. Perhaps Ozick was only indulging in a bit of polemical hyperbole, but the comparison she urges convinces me that there may be something to the idea of cultural decline after all. Wood may be the best we have, but to set him next to Wilson, Trilling, Kazin and Howe is to see exactly how far we have fallen. But before we measure that distance, let us first give Wood his due. It is large. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081208/deresiewicz.