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.
One cannot help but admire Wood for taking up old-fashioned theological arguments in the popular press. In this spirit, I would protest that he isn’t playing fair: you can’t reject Job’s appeal to ignorance only to turn around and appeal to ignorance yourself. But the story of James Wood is far from finished, and I look forward to reading future chapters.
—Mark Walhout
Hoe We Got Here: America Since the Seventies—For Better and Worse by David Frum BASIC 224 pp.; $25
Interesting question: Can a good historian also be a satirist? Masters of the form, like Waugh or Wolfe or, most recently, Richard Dooling, have tended to use the novel as their weapon of choice. But, after reading David Frum’s How We Got Here, I wonder if more historians shouldn’t have a go at it.
I should quickly add that How We Got Here conforms to the normal standards of a historical work. Frum is no Edmond Morris wannabe. He’s constructed a well-built argument—and a huge one at that—and his book is meticulously researched. But there’s also something more. Frum doesn’t merely want to refute the reigning interpretation of what happened to so drastically change America; he wants to turn it on its head. In a tradition long forgotten by historians and even by our modern jurists, he sits in judgment. And here’s where the historian meets the satirist: from his court, there is no appeal.
The prevailing idea about what went wrong with America, declares Frum, is dead wrong. Contrary to received wisdom, the sixties did not bring about a radical shift in values or actions. At the end of the decade, the average American was a “47-year-old machinist’s wife living in Dayton, Ohio … and, as far as she was concerned, the 1960’s were the 1940’s, except that frozen vegetables had replaced canned.” It was during the next decade, Frum argues, “the supposedly anticlimactic decade of the 1970’s,” that the center fell apart.
Lancelot Lamar Andrewes, the deranged antihero of Walker Percy’s best novel, Lancelot, captured this collapse best:
[T]he country is down the drain. Everyone knows it. People have lost it to the politicians, bureaucrats, drunk Congressmen, lying Presidents, White House preachers, CIA, FBI, Mafia, Pentagon, pornographers, muggers, buggers, bribers, bribe takers, rich crooked cowboys, sclerotic Southerners, rich crooked Yankees, dirty books, dirty movies, dirty plays, dirty talk shows, dirty soap operas, fags, lesbians, abortionists, Jesus shouters, anti-Jesus shouters, dying cities, dying schools, courses on how to [have sex] for school children.
Notice the intensity of this passage. Before reading Frum’s book, I couldn’t figure it out. Lancelot was published in 1977. Were the sixties really bad enough to provoke that kind of blind rage five or seven years hence?
Silly me. All of the things that Percy, using Andrewes as a proxy, rails against here were a product of the seventies. Tricky Dick, the Pentagon Papers, Deep Throat, Roe v. Wade, the explosion of pornography, gays coming out of the closet, Donahue, the collapse of marriage, the gas scare, school bussing, rampant crime, white flight, sex ed, the collapse of mainline Protestant denominations, and the rise of the evangelicals were all seventies phenomena.
Frum’s seventies were the decade of “Let’s talk about me!” (a borrowing from Tom Wolfe). A stoic, pious, trusting, liberal, hardworking people entered a tunnel at one end and came out mushy, worldly, cynical, frightened and self-absorbed at the other. Being a “practicing conservative,” Frum lays much of the blame on the Federal government.
Perhaps the harshest portrait painted is that of Richard Nixon. Faced with either raising interest rates to mitigate Kennedy and Johnson’s inflationary binge or letting it ride, Nixon replied, “I remember ’58. We cooled off the economy and cooled off fifteen Senators and sixty congressmen at the same time.” Nixon convinced his friend Arthur Burns, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, that, in fact, an “expansionary monetary policy” was needed. Burns acquiesced.
In the first half of 1971 alone, the money supply was bloated by ten percent. Inflation erupted. The dollar fell against “even the sick currencies of Europe.” The public didn’t know what to make of it. A strong dollar “was like US Steel, or the Latin Mass, or the supremacy of the New York Yankees: an imperishable fact.” Voters didn’t like the news, and they blamed the president.
Nixon’s response was to institute an economic freeze followed by wage and price controls. Overnight, his approval ratings went from 30 to 70 percent. As Frum acidly observes, the notion that “government could stop inflation, not by ending the inflation, but by forbidding businesses and workers to notice that it existed, made good sense” to the American people.
And there’s the rub. The American people, the silent majority, whatever you want to call them, were accomplices to the rot, in the economy as in so much else. Time and again, Frum puzzles at a people who just decided, no thanks, they didn’t want to be responsible any more. On sexual mores: “The sudden and total disappearance of the ideal of bridal virginity has to be reckoned one of the more astonishing psychological developments in recent American history. Here was something that men once killed and died over—and poof! it’s gone.” On the mainline denominations’ struggle over the issue of female priests: “They believed that the priest stood in the place of Christ, and that since Christ had come to earth as a man, the figure who represented him must likewise be a man. To ordain women would, they feared, cast away the most visible symbol of the old doctrine that Christ was equally divine and human. … On the other hand, to refuse to ordain women would constitute a rejection of the new doctrine of the strict and absolute equality of the sexes. Hmmm. The Nicene creed, the equality of the sexes; the equality of the sexes, the Nicene creed. … “
Lest a recently reinvigorated America get too cocky, Frum reminds us that, “if the clothes and customs of the 1970’s have gone out of style, the habits of mind are more deeply entrenched than ever.” “What we have,” he concludes, “is a newly cautious society, not a remoralized one.” And how do you argue with that?
—Jeremy Lott
Jeremy Lott is managing editor of The American Partisan. Mark Walhout is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University.
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