James Wood
The Nearest Thing to Life
[Jonathan Cape]
The celebrated literary critic James Wood has written a short book celebrating literature and criticism. This fact is perhaps unsurprising, and indeed much of the content is unsurprising to those familiar with Wood’s work. The Nearest Thing to Life meanders eloquently through Wood’s personal connection with the written word, refracted through memories of his religious boarding school childhood and his literary and critical growth and influences. Wood’s classical liberal humanist approach prevails throughout. His references are wide-ranging but generally canonical, and his approach is unabashedly – occasionally old-fashionedly – Modernist in its mystical invocations of literary communion and divine power. There is little here to truly rouse, rile or otherwise provoke a reader, and at times the work seems tame in comparison to Woods’ sharp essay treatments of specific literary figures, works or movements.
And yet, the book charms. Rather than dazzling with novelty, Wood scrutinises devastatingly simple ideas. He does the work of the novelist in making his reader examine these concepts anew through gorgeously accomplished, apt language. For instance, the importance of true-seeming *detail* in fiction – Henry James’s solidity of specification, Erich Auerbach’s mimesis – is wound into a compelling theory of ‘serious noticing’ peppered with striking evocations and examples of those ‘bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form’. Wood also extends these concepts to new contexts. The final section of this book constitutes a truly earnest attempt to understand literary spectrums of privilege and exclusion from the perspective of a man deeply invested in the literary canon, but also in exploring new and international writing. This may be because Wood understands what is at stake in our choices around the written word. Perhaps the book’s most obvious yet resonant thesis is simply the following: ‘It seemed’, to the young Wood, ‘that literary evaluation… could not be separated from the general messiness of being alive’.
Words: Gill Moore
