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The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library Paperbacks), by James Wood
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This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revolutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is.
In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.
"In America, where he now makes his home, consensus is building that James Wood, a thirty-four-year-old English-man, is the best literary critic of his generation. . . . Wood is not just a keen critic, our best, but a superb writer. James Wood is the kind of writer James Wood admires most: daring, meaty, boldly metaphoric and unequivocally committed."--Adam Begley, Financial Times
"After finishing one of James Wood's essays, I always feel that I have been in the company of a man who reads more perspicaciously and writes more incisively than almost anyone producing criticism today. His ability to transform complex, anxious thought into lucid, exciting prose is everywhere present in this wonderful book, as is an atmos-phere of civility, good sense, and justice."--Janet Malcolm
"In these essays a very bold intelligence illuminates literature and culture with a dashing fluency."--Elizabeth Hardwick
"In a distinctively impassioned voice, James Wood advances some formidable arguments for what fiction and the truthful deployment of the imagination can be. He is one of literature's true lovers, and his deeply felt, contentious essays are thrilling in their reach and moral seriousness."--Susan Sontag
"He is a true critic: an urgent, impassioned reader of literature, a tireless interpreter, a live and learned intelligence, good writing company. He has adopted the essay as his own; he uses it to write, in a way the serious writer does. That's to say, he drives his ideas hard; he hungers for metaphor . . . learned . . . cunningly brilliant."--Malcolm Bradbury, The New Statesman
"A book that makes you feel, having closed it, as if your mind has been oxygenated. While most reviewers tend to fall back on preconceived notions of good style, based mainly on their desire not to be challenged by fiction, Wood stands out for his desire to re-mint critical thought. He has the capacity to alert you all over again to the wonder of a single cadence, pulled out of the heart of a novel. He also forces you to reconsider what it is we mean when we say that a novel is real, is true, is great. There is no more, really, that we can ask of a critic."--Natasha Walter, The Independent on Sunday
"In this climate, James Wood's book is not just a pleasure in itself but a sign that things do not always necessarily go downhill. . . . 'Serious' books on literature and belief abound, but we have very few critics who can vie with Jarrell and Toynbee, who can remind us that talking about literature is a part of what literature is about, and talking about it with passion, precision, and out of a rich store of reading is a rare and precious gift: it is good for all of us that James Wood has it and we have James Wood."--Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement
"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity. To enter Wood's mind is to cross a threshold: from the reviewer commonplaces that often pass for essay-writing into the intellectual daring that portends literary permanence. He is, for the moment, our Hazlitt. He may become something more."--Cynthia Ozick
"James Wood is an authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time."--Harold Bloom
- Sales Rank: #3354528 in Books
- Published on: 2000-07-18
- Released on: 2000-07-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .50" w x 5.50" l, .91 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
For James Wood, great fiction is always a venture into danger--a journey to the farthest shores. By extension, great criticism too should demand and risk all. And his first collection, The Broken Estate, does so again and again. Since Wood graduated from Cambridge in the 1980s and began reviewing for The Guardian, his name has been preceded by phrases such as enfant terrible and followed by adjectives such as fierce, fearless, and occasionally far worse. Few critics have such an urgent relation to their reading, and it is this, combined with his all-encompassing intellect and verbal velvet, that makes Wood so terrifying--and so tender.
In his introduction to The Broken Estate he writes, "The gentle request to believe is what makes fiction so moving" (gentle, as both adjective and verb, and its adverbial form, seem key terms), and this is what Wood is drawn to explore in the Russian greats and the English, European, and American moderns, among others. Many of these essays originally appeared in the London Review of Books and The New Republic, where he is a senior editor, but his book is far from a bundle of accident. Wood's contention is that in the mid-19th century, the "distinctions between literary belief and religious belief" began to blur (or, depending on the writer, shimmer), causing a crisis for the likes of Melville, Gogol, and Flaubert, and leading to "a skepticism toward the real as we encounter it in the narrative." I suspect, however, that some will head straight for the pieces on their literary loves and not be so concerned with Wood's overarching thesis, at least initially. No matter. Each essay also stands on its own, whether the author is positing Jane Austen as "a ferocious innovator" more radical than Flaubert, Melville as the ultimate linguistic spendthrift, or Gogol as "a defensive fantasist."
In a brilliant take on Virginia Woolf--Wood makes even the much-discussed new--he declares (admits?) that "the writer-critic, wanting to be both faithful critic and original writer," is caught "in a flurry of trapped loyalties." But he himself almost always works his way out of such snares, one of the many joys of this book. In his analysis of the several sides of Thomas More, for example, Wood first reads Utopia as a comedy but then suggests we read it "more tragically--not as a Lucianic satire but as a darkly ironic vision of the impossible." The aphorisms and aperçus come thick and strong. (Keepers of commonplace books should start a separate volume just for Wood.) For example, "Leslie Stephen acted like a genius but he thought like a merely gifted man." Or, "Hemingway has a reputation as a cold master of repetition, an icicle formed from the drip of style, while Lawrence is most often seen as a hothead who fell over himself, verbally." And he also has a gift for the telling domestic detail: Gogol "irritated others by playing card games he had invented and then changing the rules during play. He became rather selfishly involved with undercooked macaroni cheese, a dish he made again and again for guests." But Wood will dislike being complimented on his sentences as much as he claims Woolf did. His art, too, must be measured in chapters.
Wood is a great lover, and this makes him if not a great hater then one who gets hot under the critical collar, his ardor turning to irritation and intemperance in pieces on Morrison, Pynchon, and Murdoch. But in his finest discussions--among them one on Chekhov and another on late-20th-century treasure W.G. Sebald--he instantly quickens writers, books, and readers into being. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
At a mere 33 years old, Wood has produced an unlikely and brilliant first book collecting his reviews (from the New Republic, where he is the full-time book critic, the London Review of Books and elsewhere). Neither a programmatic study nor a grab bag of occasional work, these 21 pieces give a compelling account of modern fiction that is as conscientious as it is idiosyncratic, adducing a gallery of personal heroes (Herman Melville, Nikolay Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald), of more-or-less villains (Ernest Renan, George Steiner, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Julian Barnes) and of great in-betweeners (Thomas More, T.S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Philip Roth). Like Woolf's reviews, which he praises eloquently, Wood's really are essays, the incisive, beautifully turned workings of a literary mind. Even before the final, title piece, which links Wood's childhood in an evangelical Anglican family to his religious preoccupations, the book reveals a reader whose prejudices are as interesting as his conclusions, and whose radical Protestant upbringing seems to have given him an acute outsider's feel for American fiction. (Wood's ornery critiques of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo do them more honor than most critics' praise.) Wood is least convincing when he codifies his tasteApretty much anything he likes he calls "realistic," whether it's Gogol's "Nose" or Woolf's interior monologuesAbut this is rare. One often wonders what Wood's take would be on writers absent from these pages, Anthony Trollope, say, or Leo Tolstoy, William Gaddis or David Foster Wallace, who seem temperamentally matched to his concerns. In other words, one wants Wood reading over one's shoulderAand for a reviewer, that may be the highest possible praise.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this collection of essays, Wood, formerly literary critic at The Guardian in London and now at The New Republic, probes the similarities and differences between literary belief and religious belief. Wood asserts that these distinctions became blurred around the middle of the 19th century, when the old estate (belief in the absolute divine truth of the Gospels) broke. At that point the Gospels began to be read "as a kind of a novel. Simultaneously, fiction became an almost religious activity." Looking at the work of a variety of writersAfrom Austen, Melville, and Woolf to Pynchon, Updike, and MorrisonAWood holds contemporary writers up to the history of the form. Wood provokes, entertains, and stimulates, whether you agree with all his conclusions or not. If cataloged with key-word-searchable contents, this collection would be very valuable to college students looking for paper topics. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.AMary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
28 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant, with the promise of better things to come.
By E. Hawkins
'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.
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Percipient Pepperbox
By A Customer
A lot of praise is being heaped upon Mr Wood, and much of it is deserved. The Broken Estate is a damn fine book of criticism in an age which produces, mostly, badly-written puffed-up nonsense by those who read books for money without loving them. Wood writes terribly well, loves books and thinks arguing about them matters. Indeed, Wood believes good books matter too much for their own sake to be used merely as hostages in the latest battle of the critical theory wars. God bless him for that.
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.
4 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
repetitive to say...but brilliant
By Charlus
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.
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