There are two voices in Serious Noticing, a recent collection of James Wood’s essays. One is the informed, professorial voice, while the other is the voice of an emotional, straight-talking common reader.
Early in his career, James Wood, the commanding, occasionally contentious literary critic at The New Yorker—once anointed “the last critic”—used a pseudonym. He published serious pieces under his own name, but his “hackwork,” as he has called it—short, 50-word reviews churned out for money—were the work of one Douglas Graham (Wood’s two middle names).
I thought often of Douglas Graham while reading Serious Noticing, a new collection of Wood’s writing. Two voices vie in this book. There is the voice we recognise in the reviews: the professor, stately and composed, guiding the reader through forensically close readings of the text, pointing out fiction’s innovations and revolutions—the “failed privacies” of Chekhov’s characters, the “unwrapped” consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s novels. The other voice—pitched about half an octave higher, blunt, reedy, very winning—pops up in the essays. I began to think of it as belonging to Douglas Graham, pragmatic Graham, who once paid the bills and still gives it to us straight.
The reviews and essays settle into a rolling rhythm, pleasing counterpoints. In the criticism, Wood stands at the front of the classroom, extolling that “serious noticing,” an attentiveness to language and the world that can serve as a small stay against oblivion. In the essays, Graham unravels all such certainties, lightly trolling: How absurd that I’m paid to do this work! How long will the money last? Wood luxuriates in D.H. Lawrence’s “joyously messy” sentences. Graham upbraids himself for being such a good boy, and for never daring to write such sentences himself. Wood is haunted by fiction and its effects; two reviews in the collection, written 20 years apart, analyze the same short story, Chekhov’s The Kiss. Graham, meanwhile, daydreams about giving his books away. Wood contemplates the death of God; Graham, the overdose of The Who’s Keith Moon.
In the introduction, Wood mentions that he was taught how to read by a deconstructionist who would badger the class with the same question: “What are the stakes here?” The two voices mingling in this collection give a beautiful, moving sense of the stakes of criticism as Wood has practiced it, vigorously, without interruption for 30 years: What does it mean to do this work well, and what does it add to the world? What has it added to his life? Wood’s latest novel, Upstate, which follows a deeply depressed philosopher, dramatises these questions about the relationships between analysis and fulfillment. He writes in that book: “If intelligent people could think themselves into happiness, intellectuals would be the happiest people on Earth.”
Wood had his deconstructionist, and many of us have had James Wood. No modern critic has exerted comparable influence in how we read. So many popular notions of what constitutes a telling detail or plausible character, or why we think stories move us, flow from his criticism and his stylish craft manual, How Fiction Works. His take is passionately partisan, and he’s faced charges of being wedded to realism and intolerant of fiction that doesn’t pursue his designated aims.
That classical, very consistent taste (which critics would term “narrow”) can occlude how surprising, open and deeply unusual his criticism can be. Who else would describe criticism as “modesty” or as “simplicity and near-silence”? For all the institutional authority Wood possesses, one of the great pleasures he takes in criticism seems to be the opportunity for self-forgetfulness. He speaks admiringly of artists who merge with their work: Glenn Gould “becomes the piano, Moon becomes the drums”; Naipaul is “colonized” by his characters; Chekhov transforms into them “more completely than any writer before him.” Wood writes as if enmeshed in the text itself; registering shifts in point of view and perspective with seismographic precision.
Serious Noticing pulls from Wood’s previous collections, including The Broken Estate, The Fun Stuff and The Nearest Thing to Life. There are essays on his lodestars (Chekhov, Bellow, Woolf) along with newer discoveries (Jenny Erpenbeck, Elena Ferrante). He includes two sharply critical pieces—a review of Paul Auster and his famous takedown of “hysterical realism,” the hectic, information-besotted novels of the early aughts, including Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. There are, however, none of the slashing reviews that first made his name.
“This may be the wisdom of middle age—the reverse of the red sports car,” Wood has said. “I’m less hung up on greatness than I used to be. And maybe correspondingly, I’m a less severe judge than I used to be.”
A less severe judge perhaps, but to go by these reviews, a keener reader and a clearer writer. The aggressive plumage and swagger of the young critic has fallen away—mercifully. (From an early piece on Melville: “In this book meaning is mashed up like a pudding. The Godhead is indeed broken into pieces. Truth is kaleidoscopically affronted.”) In his two readings of Chekhov’s The Kiss, 20 years apart, the argument doesn’t alter but the tone does, from the gavel-pounding verdict (“this was his revolution”) to a new note, of wonder, as Wood relishes Chekhov’s details (“See, there they are, talking to us: the poplar, the lilac and the roses”).
At least three deaths haunt this book: the deaths of Wood’s in-laws and the death of his mother. There is stark personal accounting here; the “serious noticing” of the title has as much to do with the self as with texts. He is taking stock of childhood, and his decades in America, and in doing so he performs a kind of literary criticism on his own life. What it misses, he realises, is the pungency of detail, the pungency of his childhood in England, when every object seemed invested with meaning: the sound of the trains at night, his mother’s shoes. He recalls his father listening to Beethoven sonatas—his father, who in his later years lived without any music at all. The CD player had broken, and he told no one. It was too expensive to fix, he thought, and he was too busy, too anxious, caring for Wood’s mother.
Little in “sanitized” adult American life, where Wood is productive and content, seems to have the same kind of purchase as those bygone places and people, that bygone music. He does not tell us—he does not need to—where those vivifying details can still be found (“the poplar, the lilac and the roses”). “To notice is to rescue, to redeem,” Wood writes. “To save life from itself.”
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