James Wood: The Irresponsible Self
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, October 2004]
Often the critics I enjoy reading most are those who flip on lights in the living rooms of works of art, or, more generally, in the world of art at large. These illuminations often have one of three effects: they reveal new ideas about works of art I was already familiar with; they point me to works of art I hadn’t yet known of; or, often best of all, they produce connective beams of light—like those that zap on in mansions being robbed—that reveal the relationships between works of art I hadn’t thought to consider side by side. In critic and novelist James Wood’s fair and discerning recent book, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 312 pgs, $24), these three effects synthesize in a single rewarding volume.
The thematic string Wood winds around the 22 essays in this book is, he says in the introduction, “a kind of tragicomic stoicism which might be called the comedy of forgiveness,” an alternative to what he calls “the comedy of correction.” Wood states that this comedy of forgiveness seems to him the creation of modern fiction (meaning lit from the late-19th- and 20th centuries) “because it exchanges typology for the examination of the individual, and the religious dream of complete or stable knowledge for the uncertainty of incomplete knowledge.” Instability and incompleteness create, or better yet allow room for, the ‘irresponsible’ characters of the book’s title, characters the reader laughs with, not at, and ultimately forgives. (Not surprisingly, Wood’s thesis might best be understood by reading his own well-realized, tidy novel, The Book Against God, reviewed in these pages in September 03.)
Interesting though this wrap-around thesis is, understanding it, or even approving of it, isn’t a necessary condition to finding reward in the book. In the individual essays, Wood tackles Bellow, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, contemporary writers Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo and Zadie Smith, as well as (if only to me) lesser or unknown writers like Giovanni Verga, Henry Green, Monica Ali, and J.F. Powers. As Wood calls the last of these ‘the writer’s writer,’ I’d call Wood himself the ‘reader’s reader’; he brings to his criticism a keen sense of narrative style, an appreciation of humor and seriousness, an ability to draw compelling parallels, and a crisp writing style that shows his own gifts for metaphor and word choice.
Examples abound of statements enviably phrased. There are the detailed comments—of one V.S. Naipul passage, “…how nicely the sentence docks at its final, rising word”; of Joseph Roth’s Empire of Signs, “The novel’s formal beauty flows from its dynastic current, which irrigates the very structure of the book”—but also larger statements that distill an author’s strengths: J.M. Coetzee’s novels are “intelligently starved”; inside Tom Wolfe’s novels are “immense twisted colons of plot”; Tolstoy’s characters feel so real to us because “reality appears in his novels as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters.”
It’s not all this sunny. Before publishing his own first novel, Wood gained a reputation as a tough critic unafraid of taking whacks at those already deemed critic’s darlings. In two of the book’s most interesting essays, “Hysterical Realism” and “Jonathan Franzen and the ‘Social Novel,’” Wood makes a case against what he calls the “big, ambitious novel”—specifically, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest , and others. His primary argument, that “[i]nformation has become the new character,” can be well understood in this passage:
Again and again, books like these are praised for being brilliant cabinets of wonders. Such diversity! So many stories! So many weird and funky characters! Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation. The mere existence of a giant cheese or a cloned mouse or three different earthquakes in a novel is seen as meaningful or wonderful, evidence of great imaginative powers. And this is because too often these features are mistaken for scenes, as if they constitute the movement or workings or pressure of the novel, rather than taken for what they are—props of the imagination, meaning’s toys. The existence of vitality is mistaken for the drama of vitality.
He has a point. Zadie Smith herself (whose novel had the cloned mouse) has, since her novel’s success, voiced concern about its hyperactivity. And while I thought highly of each of the books listed above (particularly Infinite Jest, a complex, brilliantly patterned masterpiece Wood conveniently under-treats here), it’s difficult not to start to nod at his many examples of excess. Wood probably could have taken the reader further—examining if it’s right, after all, that information has become the new character, three decades into the information age—though it would’ve dulled his point and dampened his nostalgia for a powerfully simple scene in Dickens, when two characters sit in a room and weep. (A note to Wood: Revisit page 916 of Infinite Jest. Gately stands in a room and weeps, and it’s incredibly moving.) Wood also gets himself into a bit of trouble in an essay on J.M. Coetzee, criticizing the writer’s “wary self-governance” and “fondness for intellectual and formal tidiness.” To carp on the excesses of Wallace et. al and the tidiness of Coetzee would seem to leave a small sweet spot for writers to hit.
And yet writers do, as evidenced by one of the overriding feelings felt in this book: Wood’s readerly gratitude. Of a Joseph Roth passage, Wood writes, “One reads this glorious passage as Roth intends us to, in the spirit one feels Roth wrote it in, which is childish wonderment.” Rereading Saul Bellows’ Herzog, he writes, “one encounters too many marvels to record,” though he gives it a go. “I recall first reading ‘Jeli the Shepherd,’” he writes in another essay, “led there by [D.H.] Lawrence’s enthusiasm, and sitting stiff in my chair with concentrated delight.”
Should it matter that up till now I hadn’t heard of this last story, or even the writer? As a reviewer, I can’t vouch for Wood’s statement. But as a reader, I can’t wait to go find the story and experience it for myself. And this is one of the things I appreciate most about James Wood: his understanding of, and appreciation for, what reading gives us—as solitary readers, but also as participants in the big conversation, seated at the table, seeing more, and seeing more sharply, for the lights that have just come on.
