The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief [Paperback]

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.")

But let us not rush to praise James Wood too much, too soon. As of yet, there is a kind of laziness, an unwillingness to read too closely, to spend too long examining deeply in detail the particular interchanges among the complex webs of meaning great writers create. Wood is now painting with a critical brush too broad for refined contemplation of particular literary moments. Here again one is tempted to bemoan the modern moment. Like so many editors, reviewers, and academics, one imagines he has too much to read too quickly to consistently manage the extended and leisured living-with which our greatest works require. Thus Wood appears to read---not always, but too often--superficially. There are the marks of such a problem throughout this text; moments of missing the matter which matters most.

Most blaring is the essay on Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. I do not criticise Mr Wood here for coming to a particular conclusion about the merits or otherwise of the work. Rather I suggest that many of the substantial claims he makes about the use of allegory and the employment of intellectual history are factually unsustainable. The confusion of allegorical multiplicity with ethical equivocation is the product of a too-shallow reading, of a reading-to-deadline.

Still, I sympathise. Wood could neither professionally avoid publishing something on Mason & Dixon nor muster enough time to consider this monumental tome with sufficient seriousness. It is a position the late, great novelist William Gaddis understood all too well. The result is a little embarrassing. And yet---here is the gem---within this weakest essay of the collection are half a dozen indispensable gut-level insights, powerfully stated. That alone is most of what we can ask of a critic. Through sheer talent, Wood makes himself worth remembering, even when he is sloppy and wrong.

Mostly, he is neither sloppy nor wrong. Buy this book now, and hope for a better, soon.