Notoriously merciless on those he considers the betrayers of fiction’s possibilities–and the roster of these scrivener Judases includes many of the literary lights of the last half century, from John Updike and Don DeLillo to Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison–Wood has few kind words for the type of knowing, self-consciously playful post-Barthelme writing that, for better or worse, has dominated the salon for the past several decades. Nor does he harbor any more fondness for the allegory-riddled descendants of Pynchon or research-mad creations a la Julian Barnes.
Wood is reverent, though, about a different conception of fiction, one in which the reader is held in a state of fitful belief–belief in the world created by the writer, fealty anchored by the dead weight of realism. He relates this idea of belief in a complex way to that of the theological all-or-nothing that Christianity once presented to humanity before what he sees as its final collapse and displacement in the 19th century. Wood hews to this mid-19th/early-20th-century-sounding faith in fiction’s redeeming–nay, transubstantiating–power at a time when few fellow believers remain in the literary chapel. A curious critical apparatus, to say the least, for a writer who among other things plies the trade of contemporary fiction. The obsession with faith, belief and transcendence strikes one today as interesting but queerly dated, and when Wood is in full Jonathan Edwards mode, hectoring at his literary sinners, he seems most creakily out of step with contemporary culture.
Book critics are different from other critics in one crucial respect: they are the only species in the critical genus to use the same medium–the written word–as the object of their criticism. No one expects a film critic to try his or her hand at making movies; and though many art critics are in fact practicing or lapsed artists, it’s hardly a prerequisite for the job. Nor (with the possible exception of a handful of artist-critics like Ad Reinhardt or Joseph Kosuth) is there an overlap between what any critic turns out and any creative artist produces except in the case of the writer. In Wood’s case, the overlap is doubly interesting, for he not only creates a peculiarly writerly criticism, full of rhetorical flourishes and startling metaphors; he has also been rightfully hailed for the rigorous beauty of his critical writing, and as an essayist few produce more artful prose.
That fact made it all the more interesting when Wood decided to follow the example of any number of critics in the past century and publish a novel. Whenever the critic writes as a novelist, the line between the fiction and the criticism can become notoriously difficult to fathom. When the novelist is as deadly serious, often censorious, and stylistically capable a critic as James Wood, the divide becomes even blurrier.
When Wood’s first novel, “The Book Against God,” appeared in stores last month, one could almost hear the knives sharpening. The book is a comic novel of ideas narrated by Thomas Bunting, an abject philosophy student whose slovenly devotion to a ranting atheistic tome, “The Book Against God,” and compulsive lying has derailed his academic progress as well as his marriage to a beautiful classical pianist. In flashbacks, Bunting narrates the crisis that occurs upon the death of his father, a sweet and intellectual former theology professor who has abandoned the ivory towers for life as a rural Anglican vicar. The novel becomes a philosophical reflection on truth, lies, belief and self-knowledge shot through Bunting’s ruminations on theodicy. A novel of action it is not. As many reviewers of the book pointed out, readers of Wood’s criticism, collected in 1999 in “The Broken Estate,” will recognize more than a few autobiographical elements in the novel, even down to the talky philosophizing and endless citations of Kirkegaard (Wood himself, raised in an evangelical Church of God family, lost his faith as a teenager, studied philosophy at Cambridge before abandoning the academic life and turned to literary criticism). The closeness of Bunting’s obsessions and Wood’s own did little to keep reviewers from seeing the penumbra of Wood’s big-picture critical agenda on “The Book Against God.” Ironically, when reviewers did focus in fact on the novel itself, the result was a parade of blurb-worthy comments waiting to be plucked for the back cover of the novel’s next printing: the New York Observer’s Adam Begley wondered hopefully what Wood could do with a “vast canvas, a broad brush and bold palette.” Morris Dickstein, writing in Slate, commented that the novel was indeed “too well-written,” with metaphors that were so overpowering they bullied the text. Sportswriter Allen Barra, moonlighting in the San Francisco Chronicle, gushed that “The Book Against God” was “real flesh and blood, rather old-fashioned … with humor, passion and some serious flaws that strangely serve to make the novel more endearing.” And Jeffrey Meyers, in the Los Angeles Times, commented that “the witty, serious and intelligent ‘The Book Against God,’ its theological meaning cradled in the arguments of ‘The Broken Estate,’ matches Wood’s high critical standards.” (Perhaps the weirdest review in the good-or-bad-novel genre came from Heidi Julavits in the Voice Literary Supplement. Julavits, who recently authored a 9,000-word plea against “snarky” reviewing and in favor of a more hospitable community of book critics in The Believer, the review she coedits, pans “The Book Against God” by awkwardly trotting out Proust as a foil to Wood. For her effort, Julavits wins the using-a-big-hammer-on-a-little-nail award.)
But even in those reviews in which the novel is judged on its own terms–to paraphrase Wood’s introductory essay in “The Broken Estate,” according to the criteria for aesthetic judgment that every novel brings with it–the absence of reference to Wood’s criticism feels oddly like a case of what tweedy old Freudians referred to as reaction-formation and what might be recast as special pleading. Far more ambitious are those reviews that welcomed the opportunity, however obvious a move it may seem, to hoist Wood the critic by the petard of Wood the novelist. A few, like Schuessler in The New York Review of Books and Sven Birkerts in The News & Observer of Raleigh-Durham, wonder about the particularly restrained, even wan effort on Wood’s behalf (Schuessler: “As a critic, Wood has written acutely of the novelist’s paradoxical relationship with the truth. But as a novelist he has invoked the problem of literary truthfulness without really dramatizing it.” Birkerts: “For me, the real question is: Why are celebrated critics, who are, to a person, bold and fierce with their opinions and judgments, so timorous about creating fictional worlds on the page?”) The most unapologetic in this regard is Daniel Mendelsohn, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, who is terrifically candid about his agenda: “It’s not very interesting simply to point out (or exult in) the fact that a first-rate critic can write a novel that’s just O.K., as so many have already gleefully done. Far more interesting is that in Wood’s case, the flaws–or rather the fact that there are flaws–in the novel bring you to the heart of what’s wrong with the criticism.” Slyly praising the novel in Woodian code for the very virtues that the critic routinely dismisses (particularly its heavy reliance on an allegorical engagement) while appropriating some of Wood’s more memorable lines (faulting the dialogue for being “not how a character would express himself; it’s how the author expresses himself,” is straight out of Wood’s argument against DeLillo), Mendelsohn makes “The Book Against God” the epilogue in “The Book Against Wood.”
In fact, Mendelsohn sees the novel as laying bare Wood’s entire critical enterprise. We get the novel our culture deserves, Mendelsohn writes, and the fiction we have today reflects “one way that 21st-century novels react both to their literary forebears and to their anxious times.” If that reads as a truism, Wood seems never to have fully entertained this possibility. Mendelsohn closes on the hopeful note that the reception of “The Book Against God” and the frequently dropped emperor-has-no-clothes charge it raises against Wood’s criticism might lead the critic to write a Revised Standard version of his agenda. That maybe as likely as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. But for bringing about one of the more thoughtful, exacting set of reviews of a first novel in recent memory, we should be grateful that Wood wrote “The Book Against God.”
