James Wood (critic)

Early life and education

James Wood was born in Durham, England, to Dennis William Wood (born 1928), a Dagenham-born minister and professor of zoology at Durham University, and Sheila Graham Wood, née Lillia, a schoolteacher from Scotland.

Wood was raised in Durham in an evangelical wing of the Church of England, an environment he describes as austere and serious. He was educated at Durham Chorister School (on a music scholarship) and at Eton College (with the support of a bursary based on his parents' "demonstrated financial need"; his older brother attended Eton as a King's Scholar). He read English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1988 he graduated with a First.

Career

Writing

After Cambridge, Wood "holed up in London in a vile house in Herne Hill and started trying to make it as a reviewer". He began his career by reviewing books for The Guardian. In 1990, he won Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. From 1991 to 1995, Wood was the chief literary critic of The Guardian, and in 1994 he served as a judge for the Booker Prize for fiction.

In 1995, he became a senior editor at The New Republic in the United States.

Teaching

Wood began teaching literature in a class he co-taught with the late novelist Saul Bellow at Boston University. Wood also taught at Kenyon College in Ohio, and since September 2003 has taught half time at Harvard University, first as a Visiting Lecturer and then as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism.

In 2010–11, he was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford.

Ideas

Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than the more ideologically driven trends that are popular in contemporary academic literary criticism. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting... to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that". The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments".

Wood coined the 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 characterised by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story. In response to an essay Wood wrote on the subject, author Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a:

Wood coined the term commercial realism, which he identifies with the author Graham Greene, and, in particular, with his book The Heart of the Matter. He clarified it as attention to the minutiae of daily life, taking in mind elements of the everyday that are important owing to their supposed lack of importance. He believes it to be an effective style of writing because it captures reality by depicting banal features as well as interesting ones.

Wood emphasises throughout the book How Fiction Works (particularly in the final chapter) that the most important literary style is realism. He states:

Wood additionally attests to the significance of Flaubert in developing the form of the novel:

Novelists should thank [Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert]] the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in [[Daniel Defoe

Reception

In reviewing one of his works, [Adam Begley of the Financial Times wrote that Wood "is the best literary critic of his generation".

Martin Amis described Wood as "a marvellous critic, one of the few remaining." Fellow book reviewer and journalist Christopher Hitchens was fond of James Wood's work, in one case giving his students a copy of Wood's review of the John Updike novel Terrorist, citing it as far better than his own.

In the 2004 issue of n+1, the editors criticised both Wood and The New Republic, writing: Wood wrote a reply in the Fall 2005 issue, explaining his conception of the "autonomous novel" and pointing out the editors' hypocrisy in criticizing negative book reviews in an essay that was "itself a wholly negative attack on negativity":

In response, the n+1 editors devoted a large portion of the journal's subsequent issue to a roundtable on the state of contemporary literature and criticism.

Upon the publication of Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, in 1999, Harold Bloom wrote that Wood is "an authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time." However, in a 2008 interview with Vice magazine, Bloom stated: Oh, don't even mention [Wood]. He doesn't exist. He just does not exist at all. [...] There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away. [...] A publisher wanted to send me [Wood's] book and I said, "Please don't." [...] I told them, "Please don't bother to send it." I didn't want to have to throw it out. There's nothing to the man. He also has—and I haven't ever read him on me—but I'm told he wrote a vicious review of me in The New Republic, which I never look at anyway, in which he clearly evidenced, as one of my old friends put it, a certain anxiety of influence. I don't want to talk about him.

Awards

Wood was a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.

Personal life

In 1992, Wood married Claire Messud, an American novelist. They reside in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have a daughter, Livia, and a son, Lucian.

Selected works

Notes

Wood has written the following: "I have made a home in the United States, but it is not quite Home. For instance, I have no desire to become an American citizen. Recently, when I arrived at Boston, the immigration officer commented on the length of time I've held a Green Card. 'A Green Card is usually considered a path to citizenship,' he said, a sentiment both irritatingly reproving and movingly patriotic. I mumbled something about how he was perfectly correct, and left it at that. [...] The poet and novelist Patrick McGuinness, in his forthcoming book Other People's Countries (itself a rich analysis of home and homelessness; McGuinness is half-Irish and half-Belgian) quotes Simenon, who was asked why he didn't change his nationality, 'the way successful francophone Belgians often did'. Simenon replied: 'There was no reason for me to be born Belgian, so there's no reason for me to stop being Belgian.' I wanted to say something similar, less wittily, to the immigration officer: precisely because I don't need to become an American citizen, to take citizenship would seem flippant; leave its benefits for those who need a new land."

References

References

1. (2012). "WOOD, James Douglas Graham". A & C Black; online edn, Oxford University Press, December 2011.
2. "Department of English: James Wood". harvard.edu.
3. (9 February 2013). "Head of the class". [[The Economist]].
4. Wood, James. (3 October 1996). "Child of Evangelism". [[London Review of Books]].
5. Wood, James. (2019-07-04). "James Wood · Diary: These Etonians". London Review of Books.
6. So, Jimmy. (21 December 2012). "James Wood Gets Personal". [[The Daily Beast]].
7. (15 July 2016). "About The Common". [[The Common (magazine).
8. "Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in Comparative European Literature". St. Anne's College, University of Oxford.
9. (24 October 2003). "The Critical View". The Harvard Crimson.
10. Smith, Zadie. (13 October 2001). "This is how it feels to me". The Guardian.
11. Liu, Aimee. (August 5, 2012). "Reaching for 'The Heart Of The Matter'". [[Los Angeles Review of Books]].
12. Wood, James. (2008). "How Fiction Works". Vintage.
13. Walter, Damien. (November 30, 2015). "Point-of-View Matters, But It Doesn't Matter That Much".
14. Wood, James. (2008). "How Fiction Works". [[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]].
15. Begley, Adam. (2003-06-02). "A Critic's Tidy First Novel Mixes Theology and Humor".
16. (31 January 2008). "Christopher Hitchens on Books & Ideas".
17. (Summer 2004). "Designated Haters". [[n+1]].
18. (Fall 2005). "A Reply to the Editors". [[n+1]].
19. "The Broken Estate".
20. (2 December 2008). "Harold Bloom".
21. (2023-09-01). "Wood, James".
22. Wood, James. (20 February 2014). "On Not Going Home". [[London Review of Books]].