The Irresponsible Self by James Wood | Review

Bear with me, it's a headache enough to be writing a review of a book of book reviews. If you're lucky to be reviewing a critic with a vision - as far reaching and encompassing as, say, the late Guy Davenport's - you can loosen your grip a little and allow yourself to be swept forward by the clear beauty of his arguments. If the critic is just another twitchy provocateur, like Dale Peck, you can respond to the cheap thrill of his barroom jeremiads, give him as good as you get, and extricate yourself without a bruise.

But if the critic is someone like James Wood, then you're in trouble. Wood is somewhere between the Davenports and the Pecks of the world: Neither a far-reaching visionary nor a soured novelist with an axe to grind, he encounters literature with nothing more nor less than a definite cast of mind and a talent for neat phrasemaking. These two qualities, topped off by his prestige as an Oxford grad and former chief literary critic for The Guardian, would be enough to carry Wood's reputation through any spate of flabby essay reviews, if only he wouldn't trip himself up by insisting on some sort of half-baked assertion to tie them together. In other words, his second collection of previously-published essays, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, could well have stood on its own, simply as a collection of essays, some good, some not so good, and some so wrongheaded they have to be read twice. For a critic, this is an entirely normal and respectable batting average.

As it was, the title itself threw me. I was prepared for what I hoped would be a knowing look at Fielding and Gogol and Firbank, and other masters of the kind of comic novel that actually makes you laugh out loud. Instead, The Irresponsible Self begins with a bewildering declaration by Wood that there is a type of stoical, tragicomic fiction, a secular "comedy of forgiveness" he calls it, that came to its own around a hundred and fifty years ago, and which is distinctive and progressive from the religious "comedy of correction" that found its heyday in 17th and 18th century satire (religious because it busied itself with the correction of human behavior through exposure and ridicule, whether gentle or ungentle).

This appears to be a continuation of his argument in The Broken Estate, his first collection of previously-published essay reviews. There, Wood pinpointed the mid-19th century as the moment fiction took on a brand new burden, and he blamed Matthew Arnold for it. For in trying to make the Christian message palatable for unbelievers, Arnold proposed that the mythos - the stories - that comprised the belief system of Christianity could be demoted to the low rank of folk and fairy tales, as long as its values could continue to be transmitted. As a foundation for civilization, Christian values work as well as any, better than some, and from a rationalist perspective this tradeoff seemed just fine. But to the collective consciousness it was a near-fatal blow. Because if we're no longer able to read our destinies, duties, the patterns of our lives in the Bible and Hagiography, where do we read ourselves?

In The Irresponsible Self, Wood posits that this is the modern burden of fiction - to be that textual mirror. However, we (as authors? readers? He doesn't make this clear) were to quickly discover that humans, being more complex creatures than had been in earlier times imagined, ultimately are unknowable, unreadable. Neither does this attempt to read, to know, automatically lead to individual happiness or safety in a sad and dangerous world. So, because we're all equally together on the same rudderless sinking boat, metaphorically speaking, we cut each other some slack for looking like idiots thrashing about uselessly. We "forgive" each other.

This is a cramped argument, fuzzily composed, but not too hard to follow. If only Wood would stick to it - but he doesn't. It is, he says, the subject of "many of this book's essays, the implicit and not always explicit subject". To which I cry out, my God, man, don't equivocate! I am a state-educated housewife who needs to know the cost of groceries. Is The Irresponsible Self supposed to be an examination of the tragicomic unknowableness of the modern human psyche as portrayed in novels, or are you just spreading frosting on yesterday's rolls?

So let's get to the essays themselves - all of which first saw the light of day either in The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, or other prestigious publication - and some of which, but not all, have the word "comic" or "comedy" shoehorned into their titles. There are a number of unnecessary filler pieces on Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Babel, Joseph Roth; unsatisfying reviews of works by Coetzee and the novelist-priest J.F. Powers (his dryly amusing novel, Morte d'Urban, about Catholics in Lutheran Minnesota struck, in my youth, a personal chord); an out-of-place essay not on V.S. Naipaul strictly, but Naipaul's father; valiant attempts to introduce to a wider audience the 19th-century writers Shchedrin-Saltykov, Giovanni Verga (of Cavalleria Rusticana fame) and Bohumil Hrabal (from whose work resulted the perennial arthouse film, Closely Watched Trains); and a warm, but, for this book inappropriate, appreciation of Saul Bellow that first appeared as an introduction to a collection of Bellow's stories. Wood assigns V.S. Pritchett and Henry Green their rightful place in English letters, in fairness, but says nothing that hasn't been said before. And, his piece on the Latvian-born Canadian filmmaker-writer, David Bezmozgis, has the weird feel of exoticism.

Fortuitously, the essay on Don Quixote is grounded in a thorough knowledge of the book and the life of Cervantes, and does much to wash away the hippie-dippie "Man of La Mancha" idealism that this essential but under-read work has been erringly painted with. And Don Quixote is a masterpiece of comedy. But Wood, focusing on the second volume - in which the "real" Don Quixote must assert his reality over the "false" Don Quixote (after the enormous success of the novel's first volume, Cervantes was dogged by a plagiarizer) - enters a twisted, Nabokovian forest of mirrors and misses the obvious point: This was simply the case of an author trying to protect his intellectual property with the only weapon he had at hand, his sheer genius. Cervantes wrote rings around his two-bit counterfeiter and beat him into obscure dust.

Where he does get it right, where the essay totally lives up to the book's conceit, is with Italo Svevo, famed for being the ESL student of James Joyce and for authoring that 20th-century classic of absurdity, The Confessions of Zeno. But placed as it is halfway through this motley collection, its quality sticks out like a cowlick.

Now to Wood's more consequential essays, dealing as they do with living authors. He has gained notoriety for having described Tom Wolfe's novels as "placards of simplicity" that editorialize and pontificate, and for accusing Wolfe of lacking in basic human feeling; his deconstruction of the 1998 novel A Man in Full would support these accusations. However, Wolfe's relevance as a journalist and observer petered out in the early 70s anyway; he has thereafter demonstrated, time and time again, his utter inability to create characters more subtle and complex than stereotypes - new hybrid strains of stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless - and his helplessness in recreating and interpreting current events, employing, as he does, nothing more elutriating than a sloppy reporter's shorthand. Wolfe is much too easy a target, but Wood's attack is nevertheless satisfying to read.

Fellow Brit Zadie Smith rates better, although her 2000 debut novel, White Teeth, is described as peopled with characters who are "not really alive, not fully human", whose connectedness is forced. Smith is, however, young, talented, energetic, and filled with good intentions, and Wood is inclined to take it easy on her, provided she avoid the vampiric sway of Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, and other proponents of the kind of work he calls "hysterical realism" (described below), as well as refrain from mimicking the worst strains in Dickens. Ragging on Eggers or Wallace is not a problem for me, but this Dickens wrinkle is new. Perhaps it was growing tiresome to lay blame on the usual Sterne-Joyce-DeLillo track - all masters of large, busy and exhaustingly experimental books - for their deleterious effect on modern letters, or more precisely, on modern letterists. Dickens is not known for experiments. He's only famous for writing large, generous-hearted stories that captured and kept his public. Astonishingly intuited narrative architecture is his one true gift to modern writers and, sadly, the one most ignored, distrustful as we are of beginnings, middles and ends. He did, however, also employ exaggeration, hyperbole, coincidence, and funny names to maintain the attention of his audience, and now it seems that any and all of these maneuvers are being condemned under the term of grotesquery - not in result, but in intent, as if Dickens had purposely tried to infuse new "meaning" into text with extra-narrative tricks, like an MFA candidate. But of course he was doing nothing of the kind. He was the simply the commercial television of his day, and Uriah Heep is no more cunningly monickered than Will & Grace, only nowadays no one gets the joke.

To Jonathan Franzen, who experiments less and worries more, Wood oozes a kindness, responding to the charm and directness he perceives in the author's personality. With much sympathy he reports on Franzen's public bouts of ambiguity toward "social" culture (like his on-again, off-again affair with Oprah's Book Club) and his desire to keep The Novel contentious with Society - although this is too obviously just another instance of a high-profile artist wanting to have his cake and eat it too. As for The Corrections, "He is at his finest when being ambitious and even theoretical about the soul, when he is examining consciousness." For Wood, this is the highest praise he can bestow.

Only somewhat redemptively, a subject far worthier of that particular praise, Monica Ali, receives this collection's most considered analysis. If the first function of a novel is to put a human face on consciousness - as Wood (entirely correctly, in my opinion) has stated and restated in so many words throughout his career - Ali has fulfilled that function and more in her 2003 first novel, Brick Lane. She well deserves Wood's admiration for her ability to chronicle fifteen years of an immigrant's journey from uneducated teenaged bride to mother, wife, and self-realized woman in the slums of London, by paying attention to her character's steadily growing perceptions, and describing them strictly within the limitations of Nazneen's level of knowledge at the moment. In other words, getting into her character's skin and making her real. (Which has never been, and never will be, the wrong artistic choice.)

But even as he praises, Wood minimizes, or even purposely ignores, main points of the book that are crucial to its shape and intent - the parallel story of Nazneen's sister in Bangladesh, for example - in order to stress some by now inanely shrunken point. Also, troublingly, it seems to be sort of a surprise and relief for him to find 21st-century communities in which faithfulness and tradition are still a matter of life and death (as in, for example, honor killings). The isolation of the Bangladeshi residents of Brick Lane, Nazneen's fatalism - the consequence of her religion and her lowly station - attract Wood. (Tellingly, isolation and fatalism are the qualities he found so fascinating in the works of ruralists Verga and Shchedrin, mentioned above.) Well, Nazneen might be a fatalist, but she's no footpad. Her little domestic rebellions, from stabbing her bumptious husband "by accident" during her regular chore of cutting his corns, to entering into an affair with a neighborhood wheeler-dealer, are as much a part of her mental assimilation as the steady intake of new factoids about her adopted land. Narrowly as ever, Wood not only gauges interior life solely (that is, divorced from action and causality), he uses this gauge in bestowing his regard to the new but as-yet underdeveloped citizens of western literature.

Perhaps if Salman Rushdie were a little more humble, a little more isolated and fatalistic, James Wood might like him better. So annoyed is Wood with the excessive personal pleasure Rushdie now enjoys, post-fatwa, that, for him, Rushdie's eighth novel is tainted by it; his review of Fury is a dazzling pyrotechnical display of vituperation, and more fun to read than the book. Fury is not a good novel, but it at least displays a vestige of the fearless self-indictment the author displayed in better work - Shame and The Satanic Verses spring to mind. The "tinkle of restaurants" that Wood so decries in superficial Manhattan novels has an ominous undertone in Fury. Depending how you feel about Rushdie as everyman, his autobiographical character's guilty thrashing and trashing about in the over-rich details of New York life can either be sympathized with, or seem ludicrous and crybaby.

But I'm not interested in defending Rushdie here, as his body of work is hulky enough to take a brass knuckling now and then. What I would like to address is a term famously coined by Wood and used in this and other essays: "hysterical realism". About as apt as Dale Peck's own pejorative phrase, "recherche postmodernism", it encapsulates:

...brilliant cabinets of wonders. Such diversity! So many stories! So many weird and funky characters!...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 constituted 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. One of the awkwardnesses evaded is precisely an awkwardness about the possibility of novelistic storytelling. This in turn has to do with an awkwardness about character and the representation of character in fiction, since human beings generate stories...

An uncommonly clumsy description from Wood, but he does have his finger on this particular bloating disease of current top-tier fiction. (Not that it's been difficult to identify - B.R. Myers condemned it in 2001 in "The Reader's Manifesto", and it was enough to send him howling back to Stephen King.) It is, however, in no way any kin of magical realism, nor has it ever been, although Wood has associated hysterical realism with magical realism for years, either by deeming it "magic realism's next step", or, in a more cautious mood, taking care to differentiate the frantic cousin from its sedate relation once removed. Let me say again: Hysterical realism is not magic realism. The phrase, in fact, I'd prefer to see for this kind of writing would be "narrative consumerism" and it would be more to the point. Think of it: Identity achieved through having and having and using up - isn't that what these ill-starred glossaries of western civilization are all about?

Magical realism can be the most generous and profound form for a writer to portray individual perception; in magic realism, there is room for the divine. Reason enough to keep it at arm's length from the profanity of narrative consumerism.

This deliberate blinkeredness, this inability to correctly discern the difference between the sacred and secular pathways to fiction-making - even more than the distressing narrowness of his taste - is Wood's big trip-up, and it is odd to see it come from a critic whose life's work appears to be to create a religion out of literature. But if the act of writing is a divine act of creation in of itself, literature is just a game.

But - it's a game for believers. That being the case, you're being called on to play fair, James, play fair.

Published in Small Spiral Notebook, 2005.