The Broken Estate : Essays on Literature and Belief

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, with the promise of better things to come.
Review: 'The Broken Estate' is one of the best volumes of literary criticism to have been published in the last ten years. It's plain that James Wood has immersed himself in comparative literature. That he is so young is further cause for excitement (and jealousy). I happen to disagree with Wood's assessments of some of the writers dealt with here, but I can't help admiring how seriously and enthusiastically he makes his case in each essay. The one fault I find -- and it's a localised one -- is in his writing. His prose is generally graceful, and all the essays are carefully structured, but he can lose himself in abstractions or flights of fancy. Wood demolishes the lofty pronouncements of George Steiner -- his 'imprecisions and melodramas'-- while occasionally indulging in the same sort of thing himself: the first two sentences of his introduction, for example, make no discernible sense. I don't think these lapses damage his arguments, but they distract the reader's attention, however briefly, from the main thrust of the essay. But this is a minor cavil. On the evidence of the work contained in 'The Broken Estate', we may have found the coming century's Edmund Wilson.

Rating:
Summary: repetitive to say...but brilliant
Review: Criticism for people who want to read something smart and insightful about books. It's a book for those who appreciate thinking long and deep about literature, who appreciate being introduced to aspects of language and content they may never have previously considered, who take literature seriously and feel no need to apologize for it. There simply is no critic writing today as consistently well about literature as Mr. Wood and this book is a perfect introduction to why he has acquired such a reputation at such a comparatively young age. You may find yourself disagreeing but you will be forced to think hard as to why.

Rating:
Summary: Not the urgent problem
Review: I can think of many reasons not to read literary criticism. It often seems to me that literary essays are nothing more than pretentious displays of erudition, showy namedropping. A question that vexes me sometimes is where do these critics find the time to read all that they supposedly do? And if they truly have read the seemingly countless number of books which their writing not-too-subtlety implies, wouldn't they be too over-read and, consequently, under-lived to be able to distinguish good from bad? The mark of a good critic is their ability to identify the next generation of greatness; it is all too easy to look back and stamp approval on those whom consensus has already been formed. In this way critics can survive by faking it, riding the tide of the latest trends.

No doubt it is too early to tell whether James Wood falls into the category of great critic. Based on this series of essays and the many others of which I have read by him, I can't recall him getting over-excited over a contemporary writer. Usually he focuses his energy on devaluing writers, which is fine by me since I almost always agree with him. But I can attest to the quality of James Wood in one important aspect: he is not faking it. I know this because of the things that he and I have read in common. His observations always ring true, his references always hit the mark in making his points, and his theses achieve dazzling heights of illumination. Reading James Wood is an intimidating experience because of his command of a seemingly endless supply of literary ammunition. It makes me feel as though I have not read anything really.

I do think, however, that The Broken Estate focuses too much on a problem that is perhaps less urgent for contemporary readers than it is for Wood. He is obsessed with a binary problem of belief: either the Christian Jesus or atheism. There is no such binary problem anymore. Even among contemporary Christians it is frequently not that simple. Not only are there, obviously, other religions to chose from, but there are an infinite number of ways to relate to the ideal of god in a non-religious way. The urgent question of our time seems to be "god or no god", with nominal religion serving only as an incidental issue. This is not to deny, of course, that the vast majority of people are still nominally religious. I hope Wood, in the next phase of his stellar career, focuses on this truly urgent problem of belief.

Rating:
Summary: Model Criticism
Review: In a disparaging essay on George Steiner laced with caustic asides (Steiner's obsessive "tic of the consumer's indefinite article") and penetrating insight (Steiner's "real presence," for Wood, tries to straddle the two chairs of Faith and Nihilism, collapsing between them in the process), Wood corrects Steiner's misappropriation of Pascal's wager. The reference to Pascal was not lost on this reader: James Wood is a tremendous critic who writes like a "machine infernale."

While polemos is a frequent pose for Wood, I never felt that it was a pose taken serendipitously, arguing for the sake of arguing. One can plainly see the struggle in his lines, the wrestling with both preferred authors (Woolf, Sebald, Mann) and roguish ones (Updike, Pynchon, Morrison, DeLillo, Steiner). In that sense, he remains the heir to the Johnsonian legacy of encomiastic criticism. Though I may disagree at times, I am grateful for Wood's brave and necessary polemics. In fact, so impressed am I with Wood's essays that I will often secretly read The New Republic (which I in general find distateful) solely for his contributions. The New Republic is lucky to have him; we are lucky to be living at a time when he is writing.

Rating:
Summary: Model Criticism
Review: In a disparaging essay on George Steiner laced with caustic asides (Steiner's obsessive "tic of the consumer's indefinite article") and penetrating insight (Steiner's "real presence," for Wood, tries to straddle the two chairs of Faith and Nihilism, collapsing between them in the process), Wood corrects Steiner's misappropriation of Pascal's wager. The reference to Pascal was not lost on this reader: James Wood is a tremendous critic who writes like a "machine infernale."

While polemos is a frequent pose for Wood, I never felt that it was a pose taken serendipitously, arguing for the sake of arguing. One can plainly see the struggle in his lines, the wrestling with both preferred authors (Woolf, Sebald, Mann) and roguish ones (Updike, Pynchon, Morrison, DeLillo, Steiner). In that sense, he remains the heir to the Johnsonian legacy of encomiastic criticism. Though I may disagree at times, I am grateful for Wood's brave and necessary polemics. In fact, so impressed am I with Wood's essays that I will often secretly read The New Republic (which I in general find distateful) solely for his contributions. The New Republic is lucky to have him; we are lucky to be living at a time when he is writing.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and passionate: criticism at its finest
Review: James Wood is a critic of the highest order, whose passionate engagement with literature is evident in every single essay in this magnificent collection. His sentences are gorgeous, his readings of an inspiring astuteness, and his metaphors scintillating. He is opinionated, to be sure; but even if you disagree with some of his judgments, you will feel only inspired and invigorated by these essays. If you care deeply about literature, you can't afford not to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Overrated
Review: Whatever happened to the tradition of morally serious criticism most famously exemplified by F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling? What happened to those critics whose essays exemplified what Joseph Epstein has called "gravity"? Well, in Epstein's case he succumbed to the malevolent ideological miasma of Norman Podhoretz's Commentary. Leavis' influence declined as a result of his parochialism, his narrow concentration on a few English writers, and his rather hostile and paranoid attitude towards criticism. As academics concentrated more and more on trying to define what literature, many of the forums for the public intellectual took an increasingly hysterical and demagogic attitude towards modern literary theory. Given the New York Review of Books' notorious reluctance to attract new talent, and the ideological prejudices of the American right, where is a new critic going to come from?

James Wood is one such critic, and to say he is one of the best contributors to the New Republic is not praise enough. Better to say that he reminds one of the New Republic when it was an honest magazine. Intelligent, thoughtful, morally serious, his collection does not show all his virtues. It does not include his witty evisceration of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, which demonstrates the difference between a flashy journalist and a real novelist. A great critic tries to remind us of the unaccountably neglected and the forgotten. The only essay here which does that is a fine one on the great Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. (Later essays on Giovanni Verga and Henry Green were written after this book was published.) Wood grew up in an English evangelical household and gradually lost his faith in God's existence. The nonconformist attitudes still remain though, with sometimes unhelpful results. An essay on Thomas More comes close to blaming him for not being a Protestant, and it is based on a dated Protestant historiography of the Reformation that has come under severe challenge from Eamon Duffy, Alexander Walsham and Christopher Haigh. This moralism leaks into his review of Morrison's Paradise, where he criticizes for being insufficiently judgmental.

But the one essay that is truly unforgivably flawed is "Half Against Flaubert." Wood castigates Flaubert for being heartless, unsympathetic, morally empty. That he could make these judgements without reference to Flaubert's "Three Tales" is absurd. It would be like discussing Tolstoy without reference to "The Death of Ivan Illych." Aside from insinuating that Flaubert is metaphorically guilty of the Catholic and monastic heresy of flagellation, Wood's criticisms of A Sentimental Education is singularly obtuse. He cites Henry James criticism, as if it were obvious that James was Flaubert's superior. "The only burning question of Sentimental Education is whether Frederic is going to have sex with his various lovers." No, the burning question is whether there is Frederic Moreau's life and anything in Orleanist and Second Empire France that can preserve him from being suffocated by a heartless conservative mediocrity. Reading this essay in the New Republic I was struck by the fact that this journal was one that looked like it has been edited by A Sentimental Education's cast. It certainaly has more of its share of Naive Moreaus, ruthlessly fashionably Roques, fanatical turncoat Seneschals and unsuccessful opportunistic Deslauriers. To say that Moreau is "bland" misses the point. Many people are, and many more are made that way by the world. At one point Wood praises the moral intelligence of Jane Austen and praises' James' creation of Gilbert Osmond as a truly evil character. In contrast to Flaubert, cannot one say that James and Austen rig the sentiments slightly? Would we feel that Osmond was so evil is he had not married someone as unusually beautiful and sensitive as Isabel Archer?

Otherwise, what we do have here are a collection of interesting and thoughtful essays. D.H. Lawrence is given a sympathetic hearing which helps counter the view that he drowned his gifts in a lunatic, misogynistic quasi-fascism. Gogol, Chekhov and Roth's Sabbath's Theatre are all intelligently appreciated. George Steiner, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison are all intelligently criticized, a virtue to be appreciated when many of Wood's colleagues at the New Republic and the New Criterion would simply castigate them for having opinions more liberal than Madeline Albright. For those who think John Updike can never be castigated enough, they will find witty confirmation from Wood. ("Sex exists for Updike as grass does, or the metallic sheen of an air-conditioning unit. This is not philosophical at all, but a rather boring paganism, which finds the same degree of sensuality in everything.")