James Wood: New testaments

James Wood, the choirboy who grew into a high priest of literature and a pitiless critic, has written a novel of his own. Boyd Tonkin talks to him about faith, doubt and fiction

Gamekeeper-turned-poacher acts seldom come any more spectacular than this. James Wood, the most feared, respected and (in some quarters) loathed critic of his generation, has written his first novel. And, yes, media circles have grown loud with the buzz of sharpening knives.

By the time he reached 30, Wood had attracted a reputation for magisterial, fastidious brutality. No widely read pundit had skewered and sliced to such effect since the youthful prime of Mr Clive James, a quarter-century earlier. "There was a certain amount of swinging around with swords and slaying people," Wood recalls, with a measure of understatement.

When I make the James comparison, the unexpectedly genial terminator replies, "Well, I'm losing my hair, so that's a start." All the same, he explains that "reviewing always felt to me like a long gestation, an apprenticeship. The attention I paid to writers' styles in particular was a very greedy, appropriative one".

Now this hunger has nourished fiction of his own: The Book Against God (Cape, £12.99). We discuss it in a hotel lounge a bell's-peal away from the heavy stones of Bath Abbey, as the honey-coloured city of Jane Austen gleams in a thin spring sun.

Wood left British journalism in the mid-Nineties to become a senior editor for the New Republic in Washington DC. Recently, he has been living in Amherst, Massachusetts, where his wife – the novelist Claire Messud – has just finished a stint as a campus writer-in-residence. The swingeing critic returns to Britain both "genuinely curious" to see what his peers make of his debut and, of course, slightly worried.

In his landmark essays on fiction and faith, Wood plunges into the conflict between the stories told by the secular novelist and the religious believer with a commitment rare in the godless climate of modern letters. Raised in an evangelical Durham home, he developed into a fundamentalist of great fiction – a champion of its liberating powers and freedoms. And it was, of course, the Bath-besotted Jane Austen who in Northanger Abbey answered the put-down phrase "only a novel" with the riposte: "only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed ... in the best chosen language". There, more or less, the Reverend Wood still stands.

Yet he denies that literature has filled a God-shaped hole for him: "Temperamentally, it's a replacement for religion, and the intellectual habits are no doubt evangelical. It's fair to say that some of the zeal with which I've prosecuted people is inseparable from my background." Wood argues that fiction can only promise a very limited transcendence. "It's just aesthetic grace. It's not more than that. I live by literature, as it were, but I'm not sure that one can go out and suggest that other people should."

The Book Against God depicts a feckless and devious young drifter who lives not by faith but anti-faith. Wood's mendacious hero Thomas Bunting (who shares a County Durham childhood with the author) has sent his moral sense "on sabbatical since puberty". Thomas repudiates the generous Broad Church piety of his vicar father, Peter. But he has hidden this apostasy: "My lies were saving the truth." Mired in falsehood, he makes a mess of his academic career and his marriage to a pianist – the virtuous virtuoso, Jane. He saves all his passion for an atheistical tract entitled "The Book Against God". A return to the North from his eternal-student life in London brings an encounter with the "red flower" of his rock-like father's faith and – after Peter's death – a reprise of Thomas's insuperable doubts.

Wood the secularist avoids giving the devil – or the doubter – all the best tunes. The son of a zoologist, he was raised in a fervent home under "the command economy of evangelical Christianity". His exposure to "a more relaxed style of worship" came at Durham Cathedral, where he sang happily in the choir. But, in contrast to the stern Wood household, Thomas grows up under the wing of a warm, forgiving faith. "It seemed much more interesting, fictionally, to take a character and give him an ideal Christian background," Wood says. "Here's someone whose parents have done no wrong. They're fine examples of the Christian life. Why on earth would he reject this version of Christianity, which is tolerant, undogmatic, intelligent and reasonable?"

Wood gives his unbelieving protagonist a tough time. Not only does Thomas come across as an uncomely blend of slob, spiv and prig. The novel dissects what its author calls "the state of arrest in atheism, whereby you're in a relationship with a God whose existence you're supposed to deny. You're continually evoking something you should by rights have got rid of". Wood does believe in the duty of fiction to dramatise the other case, the opposing view. His novel achieves that. So what if some sly theologian wishes to read The Book Against God as a book for God? "I'd be perfectly happy with that."

All of which might imply that James Wood, defender of creative words against the revealed Word, has begun to sneak back to the altar. Not so, he maintains. He turned from God in his teens, and has never turned back. But the habits of mind survive. Both essays and novel gnaw at the question of Heaven, and why – if God loves us – we have to endure the trials of this world before we get there. "Why weren't we whisked there straight away?" he asks. "If we accept that God was lonely and wanted to lavish love on his creation, clearly he could have just put us in Heaven and had some company." The theological itch persists. "It's intellectually unfinished," Wood says, "but it seems to me that, spiritually, it is finished."

Wood's parents are still alive, and once or twice he shows anxiety about what they might make of his novel. When the former chorister bloomed (not long after leaving Cambridge) into a scimitar-tongued newspaper critic, he did upset their expectations. "They were initially resistant to the idea of my doing journalism, because in bourgeois terms it seemed uncertain, and in moral terms it seemed uncertain." He accepts that "There is a clash, and always will be, between the profession of literature and the profession of faith they have. On the whole, I think that I haven't embarrassed or disgraced them too much."

Wood the literary Puritan became famous, and infamous, for his pitiless iconoclasm about great names: Toni Morrison, Julian Barnes, John Updike, George Steiner. The legendary polymath Steiner was subject to especially severe butchery, accused of "eating his way through great works as a bat in flight blindly gobbles insects, at a hundred a minute". It caused hurt and anger. Wood's targets do care, precisely because of his pulpit manner. "That does strike people who don't like me as somehow totalitarian in nature – fist-pounding, table-thumping," the preacher admits. He often likes to pre-empt others' objections with neatly framed self-criticism.

So does he regret (say) the Steiner barrage? Well, he would "retract some of the viciousness", but the principal charges stand. For Wood, Steiner delivers "the mere music of ideas rather than the gist of them". Worse, he represents "an intellectual menace, and it's worth exercising a sort of hygienic clarity in relation to someone like Steiner". Am I imagining it, or does a sudden chill settle over the teacups?

At least, his defenders would say, Steiner does gobble up all the works that he regurgitates. Wood's brand of summary justice can risk a premature verdict. In an essay on W G Sebald, Wood brackets Umberto Eco with Julian Barnes as a writer guilty of "trivial 'factional' breeziness", someone "whose entire work is actually in homage to the superstition of fact". During our conversation, I cite the plot of Eco's bestseller The Name of the Rose in support of Wood's (sound) notion of the novel as an inherently comic and secular genre. He interrupts me to say: "I've never read it, actually. I didn't know that." That failed to stop him writing off Eco's "entire work".

Wood now believes he has lost some of his serrated edge. "I think I'm a little mellower," he says. "I'm married to a novelist, so I've seen what negative reviews can do. I've had the job of taking them to her, and reading them out – or not." It's unlikely that any pummelling The Book Against God might receive would shock Wood ("I could write a very full negative review of it now", he says), although he may be surprised at how it feels to be the anvil rather than the hammer.

For my part, I relished the loving detail of the Durham village scenes, respected the muscle and bristle of its engagement with faith and doubt – but felt that the invincible obnoxiousness of lying Thomas skewed the whole design. As for the author, he refuses to be deterred, even if this inaugural outing is "relentlessly loathed". "My proper defence would be, 'It's just a first novel. You have to start somewhere'." So there will be others? "Certainly. With a bit less God next time."

Biography

Born in 1965, James Wood grew up in Durham, where his father lectured in zoology at the university. He attended Durham choir school, where he was a cathedral chorister, and Eton College, before studying at Jesus College, Cambridge. Still in his early twenties, he began to publish influential essays and reviews, writing for the London Review of Books and becoming chief literary critic for The Guardian in 1991. In 1995, he crossed the Atlantic to take up a post as senior editor at The New Republic in Washington DC. His collection of criticism, The Broken Estate: essays on literature and belief (Pimlico), appeared in 1999. This week, Cape publishes James Wood's first novel, The Book Against God. He is married to the novelist Claire Messud.