The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
by James Wood
Modern Library, 279 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Wouldn’t you think James Wood would need a bodyguard? After all, he has one of the best jobs in the world, writing exquisite essays on literature for the likes of The New Yorker and The New Republic. Who wouldn’t love that kind of work? Not everyone, perhaps, but plenty will enjoy his elegant essays and enlightening insights into such writers as Jane Austen, Gustav Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, and others. It is not an exaggeration to call his essay on Chekov a masterpiece or to consider the title essay, which is about Melville, a major critical event. Oddly, he’s a bit harsh on several modern writers. Although he raves about Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, he doesn’t give much credit to John Updike or Don DeLillo, and his review of Toni Morrison’s Paradise is almost hostile (although I suspect this is because he may have been angered by infatuated reviewers overlooking obvious flaws in the book). It’s a cliché to say that this is literary criticism at its best, but quite frankly, that’s what it is. (But I’m sure James Wood would say it much better.)
This article appears in September 22 • 2000.