Good critics, seems to me, are as rare as good artists, and for some reason their skills rarely coincide in a single person. At the very least, a good critic situates the work in a larger context and challenges us to read more closely and to demand more from art. One critic I have profitably read for years is James Wood, via his essays on Hamsun, Martel, Updike, Zadie Smith, Coetzee, and others. The aesthetic qualities he values in literary art include psychological realism with “characters who’ve been let off the leash by their creator, and for whom the largest metaphysical questions are in play.” In addition,
Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the “big, ambitious novel” that pursues vitality “at all costs.” Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.
Wood has ripped into lots of famous writers: Updike, DeLillo, Rushdie, Franzen, Pynchon, Toni Morrison, etc. — rippings I largely agree with. The writers he admires include Bellow, Chekhov, Lawrence, Woolf, and Naipaul. In his disdain for postmodern trends, he has been accused of betraying an evangelical zeal at times (he agrees). Notably, I found his own first and only novel, The Book Against God, rather unremarkable for its character and conflict, which a critic as demanding as Wood himself would have taken to task for its humdrum vision. His gifts are more evident in his two books of essays, to which he has just added a third one, How Fiction Works. Here is a rave review:
Kenneth Tynan, the doyen of theatre criticism, once said: “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.” Certainly, nobody, not even Tynan, became a critic in the expectation of receiving bouquets. Most writers have about as much affection for them as they have for head lice. But in an age when anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed or ignorant, can preserve it in print, post it on the internet and reach a receptive audience, the need for critics who can bring their authority, experience and perception to bear on works of art and articulate what makes them great or tat has never been more urgent.
James Wood is one such. Recently appointed a staff writer at The New Yorker and the professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard, he is arguably the world’s leading critic, devoting his career to the study of fiction. Writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom and John Banville have attested to his ability to burrow beneath the skin of a novel, showing why it is less—or more—than the sum of its parts. Like all the best critics, Wood is as dispassionate as a surgeon and as enthusiastic as a child with the latest gizmo. Whether he praises or pillories, he makes you want to read the text he has freshly filleted.
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