The Nearest Thing To Life by James Wood, book review: This risk-taker's observations make the right connection

Wood's writing is benefiting from being increasingly autobiographical

Max Liu
Wednesday 22 April 2015 22:40 BST
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James Wood cites such a wide range of writers in this brief but fascinating discourse on "the game of not quite", which, he argues, characterises literature's relation to life, that I admit wondering if my own name might crop up.

Usually, I wouldn't expect to be mentioned alongside Walter Benjamin or Virginia Woolf but last time I reviewed a book by Wood he complained that my critique lacked "investment". I'm not certain what he meant but, at a mere 115 pages, his new book is definitely overpriced.

That isn't to say that it's not worth reading and at least one of its four essays can be found online. Although I never tire of reading Wood, his tendency to repeat himself and draw from the same quiver of quotes blunts his pieces when you read several in succession. Near the beginning of this book he recycles an idea from his first collection of essays, The Broken Estate (2000), which was about literature and faith: "Precisely what is a danger in religion is the very fabric of fiction."

With age, however, Wood's writing is benefiting from being increasingly autobiographical. This book begins at a funeral where Wood reflects that, like death, novels provide "that formal insight into the shape of someone's life". He describes how rejecting his Christian upbringing coincided with formative encounters with paperback classics, reveals that he was beaten 106 times by teachers at his boarding school and discusses the eye for detail which distinguishes a great novelist like Saul Bellow from a merely good one. The final essay, "Secular Homelessness", a meditation on home, exile and writing, feels disconnected from the rest of the book.

For Wood, the best critics are engaged in "writing-through", their criticism becomes literature itself, as opposed to "writing-about" which remains "condemned to exteriority". This idea chimes with my sense that there's a connection between criticism and poetry, that the most vital critics achieve what Colm Tóibín said of Elizabeth Bishop: they think aloud on the page, writing through the works they review as Bishop wrote through the animals, places and lovers that were the ostensible subjects of her poems.

Criticism involves risk. You must risk looking foolish in print as well as in life, be prepared to, as Wood says, "admit incomprehension", risk being wrong so you can risk being right. The power and originality with which he develops these ideas and many more in this book makes me think it might be worth the investment after all.

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