Part memoir, part literary criticism, this beautiful, open-ended book celebrates fiction’s ability to allow the reader to escape into other lives
It’s not every day that you get a chance to review your reviewer. It’s an opportunity that many writers would leap towards, and one that a few probably pray for. Here, I should declare an interest. I have been reviewed by James Wood, not once, but twice. There have been mentions too; one of them occurs in his new book, whose four chapters, bringing together memoir and criticism, relating the life to the practice, have been delivered before as lectures. These are acts of championing for which I’m grateful; coming from Wood, the foremost literary enthusiast of our time, even a mention is an important act of persuasion. I call him an “enthusiast” even before calling him a critic because fashioning a language with which to praise – not just authors, but the various facets of literature and reading – is a fundamental preoccupation, even an obsession, for Wood. To write of a man who has praised you is difficult, and maybe unwise. Yet it is the fact that he has praised and illuminated so much else that makes him of wider interest, just as the basic anomaly of his trajectory makes him intriguing. Here is a man who has made a successful career as an enthusiast in an age when literature has largely, in academia, been viewed with scepticism; he has been widely read, trusted and disagreed with in a time when the critic, even more than the author, is redundant.
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