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The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
by James Wood
Random House
270 pp.; $24
In a lament on the lost art of book reviewing, Jay Parini names James Wood, senior editor at The New Republic, as one of "perhaps a dozen or so reviewers whose work consistently repays careful reading" (Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 1999, p. B4). This is a remarkable tribute to a critic not much older than thirty.
Wood's talent was recognized early on. In 1987, The Guardian named him Student Journalist of the Year for his reporting in the Cambridge student newspaper, Stop Press, and promptly offered him a job reviewing books. Before long he was chief reviewer, a position he held until he joined the staff of The New Republic in 1995. Wood's decision to cross the Atlantic has enabled him to cultivate his talent as a critic, if only because The New Republic allows him the time and the space to develop reviews into full-length essays.
The Broken Estate represents the first-fruits of this growth. Though nominally reviews of new books, the essays collected here are far more ambitious in scope. Whether he's criticizing nineteenth-century giants like Gogol and Flaubert or contemporary writers like Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Wood's aim is to capture the essence of a writer's style and philosophy, and then to evaluate them vigorously—an aspect of the reviewer's art that has, as Parini complains, virtually disappeared among academic critics.
Wood's primary subject is the novel and, more particularly, its subversive relation to religious belief. The book's title refers to the collapse of the wall between religion and literature in the nineteenth century, a change personified by Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. With Renan, the gospels came to be read as fictional narratives; with Arnold, literature became a substitute for religious belief as a source of consolation and uplift.
This reversal, according to Wood, proved detrimental to both Christianity and the novel; he has no patience with either the complacency of liberal theology (Iris Murdoch, John Updike) or the hubris of the religion of art (Flaubert, Don De Lillo). Great novels, Wood insists, are born out of the conflict between religious certainty and literary doubt; he has a penchant for unrestrained, blasphemous novels like Moby-Dick, Knut Hamsun's Hunger, and Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater.
And yet, for all his love of the metaphysical novel, Wood is a staunch de fender of "realism." He judges novels according to whether the characters are "real," that is, allowed to have a life of their own, apart from the author. Thus he has high praise for such gentle, unmetaphysical writers as Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov—two of the pioneers, according to Wood, of the modern "stream of consciousness" technique. By the same token, he has little interest in magic realism (Toni Morrison's Paradise, for example) or postmodern allegory (such as Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon).
In the final analysis, Wood's distinctive critical stance comes down to the question of belief. As he confesses in an autobiographical section of The Broken Estate, he was raised in a loving, intensely evangelical family, only to lose his faith at the age of fifteen. Having concluded that Christianity is unbelievable, he now demands that fiction be believable. For Wood this is more than a matter of creating real characters; it entails acknowledging the painful reality of a world without God.
What drove Wood to unbelief as a teenager, he informs us, was the problem of evil. Twenty years later, he continues to wrestle with it (see his reflections on a killer tornado in The New Republic, June 8, 1998, p. 46). He rejects Job's answer—the ways of God are unknowable—as an insult to any thinking person. He also rejects the free will argument, declaring that we cannot know that a world without free will would be worse than our own.
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