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COSELL AT QUARTERBACK
by MARK LOTTO
September 2003
A CRITIC RISES FROM THE ARMCHAIR
THE BOOK AGAINST GOD By James Wood New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003
THE BROKEN ESTATE: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND BELIEF By James Wood New York: Random House, 2000
James Wood has written a novel, his first. That he is, perhaps, our greatest working book critic goes a long way to making up for the fact that he is, as of yet, not much of a novelist. Still, it's disheartening to learn that a giant, monster brain armed with about ten lifetimes' worth of reading in the course of one still-very-short one is no defense at all against the conventions and pitfalls of the debut novel. About Don DeLillo's Underworld, Wood once wrote that “DeLillo is not isolate; where Underworld fails, it fails collegiately.” Likewise, Wood's The Book Against God fails in the same way that so many first novels fail, in that they are barely novels at all. Their readers are often like early morning garbage men, picking up the bits and scraps of an author's autobiography that have been sorted out for recycling.
It may be to the dismay of many of Wood's fans that he has written a novel at all. This is not a fair complaint—the man, after all, is welcome to do whatever he likes—but it is true. Wood, 37, has been a literary critic ever since he graduated from Cambridge, first at the Guardian in London, currently as a Senior Editor at The New Republic. Before that he was a young, happy, brilliant boy who spent his mornings sitting in church pews as the people all around him got up to shake and dance and talk in tongues, his afternoons brightly singing in the Church of E cathedral choir, his evenings filling secret notebooks with arguments against God. He makes no mention of the novel or verse that first did it, but we sense there must have been an apple he could not help but eat. “The child of evangelicalism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference,” writes Wood, “He is always evangelical.” About literature, he is as passionate as a preacher. The witches at Salem were condemned with less vigor than Wood against Dave Eggers. And the man is no less fervent in his enthusiasms. (Moses, with his face still red, was less flattering about Yahweh than Wood is about Melville). You see, possession for him now runs the other way; he enters into, and reanimates books, as a biographer might tiptoe about behind the eyes of his subject. What makes his literary criticism then so moving, so precisely illuminating, is that, like Virginia Woolf, one of his heroes, he understands that the study of literature is as much imaginative as it is analytic. This makes him the most like a novelist of all his fellow full-time critics. Certainly, his essays are as moving as most novels and make a more inspiring case for literature than much of recent fiction.
But then most book reviewers are basically assembly line workers. They rarely have the time or energy to do much more than inspect novels for defects as if they were mattresses or blue jeans. It is a sorry way to read a lot of books. Wood works as hard as all the rest, and rumor has it just as fast, but he remains one of the few critics (certainly one of the few outside academia) to develop an Actual Goddamn Theory of Fiction, better yet, one that is not measured out by Marx, say, or mere snobbery. Even John Leonard of The Nation and Harper's, former titleholder of The Greatest Book Critic Ever, is too diffuse in his interests and his tastes to have a program much beyond enthusiasm. He just loves to love books, loves that books remind him of other books, and his sentences work like switchboard operators with their involution of wires. Wood's read everything too, could guess at what Ishmael would hear from Hamlet if their ships met out at sea, but instead of bouncing between this book and that, he has devoted himself almost exclusively to the difficult, complicated relationship between literary and religious belief. In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Wood spends a lot of his time lamenting the fact that, in the mid-nineteenth century, writers and theologians stopped thinking of the Bible as the living light-giving Word of God, not The Book but a book, a fallible, human-assembled text; it was at this same time, for reasons not unrelated, that the novel, newly risen, self-imparted a holy importance. In this moment, the old estate—the covenant or, at the very least, the governing principle that religion was True, and fiction was just fiction—shattered like a vase. “For Christianity, instead of disappearing, merely surrendered its truth claims and turned itself into a comforting poetry on the one hand or an empty moralism on the other,” he writes, “Truth slipped away. And the novel…having founded the religion of itself, relaxed too gently into aestheticism.” It must be noted, however, that Wood is as guilty as anyone when it comes to the disruptive and contaminative intermingling of literary and religious belief: though he seems to blame his atheism at least in part on the Novel, which helped water down Christianity to the point of almost not being worth believing in anymore, he has, like a hostage held too long, transferred onto the Novel all his capacity for belief, and all his passion for believing.
For Wood, the novel may be “the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity” but it is also our rehabilitation. In the opening essay of The Broken Estate, he writes:
Once religion has revealed itself to you, you are never free. In fiction, by contrast, one is always free to choose not to believe, and this very freedom, this shadow of doubt, is what helps constitute fiction's reality. Furthermore, even when one is believing in fiction, one is “not quite” believing, one is believing “as if.” (One can always close the book, go outside, and kick a stone.) Fiction asks us to judge its reality; religion asserts its reality. And this is all a way of saying that fiction is a special realm of freedom.
In other words, by making belief optional rather than binding, fiction will teach us how to believe again. It is the realm in which we practice our freedom to believe. With that, Wood reinvigorates not only our belief in literature; he perhaps reinvigorates our ability to believe in anything.
But reading his novel The Book Against God is like finding your dad inside the Santa suit. It makes agnostics out of us again. In it, Wood details the sorry, lame life of Thomas Bunting, a thirtyish doctoral student who has long neglected his philosophy thesis—not to mention his marriage—to lie about all day in bed doodling away at his atheistic Arcades Project, his Book Against God, that has now swelled to fill four large notebooks. (Imagine if Wood had never found book-reviewing, but from 15 to 30 simply kept going on his late-night anti-religious screeds.) That he is procrastinating on his thesis we can certainly understand, but Tom is also a pathological liar, a money-less snob, an intolerable prig, a lousy husband, and a proudly infrequent bather. It is hard to imagine that fiction could produce a character more self-righteous and even less charming than Holden Caulfield, but here is Tom.
As Dostoevsky's Underground Man says: “People do pride themselves on their diseases.”
There is not much plot to spoil. The novel begins and ends with Tom sitting alone in his flat, waiting, his father, the vicar, four months dead, his wife still packed up and gone, although by the end the Book Against God has become the book in our hands. In between, there is much discussion about the Lord Absentee or Almighty that despite its erudition and range of reference is not much beyond what you might hear over pizza in the dorm. And it is my unhappy duty to report that at the climax Wood resorts to that most horrid of movie clichés—the Speech Gone Horribly Wrong, in this case, Tom's eulogy for his father—and does not pull it off. The novel is a confession without an admission of guilt. Everything is spelled out, what's discovered we could have already guessed, and though he says otherwise, Tom is as much in danger of tumbling into the abyss as you are of getting sucked down your bathroom drain. It becomes very quickly clear that Wood's first novel does not live up to his own extremely high standards.
The Book Against God is not without its pleasures. Wood proves himself an insightful and eloquent reader of the world, and though the novel, as a whole, underwhelms, its constituent sentences are vital and sharp. We can only hope that someday every unsuccessful novel might include a passage as perfect as this:
Terry was silent in a way my parents never were, except when they were eating. Yes, that was it, Terry worked as if eating through his jobs, with resigned hunger. Silently he did his occasional work in all seasons: in autumn (which he called the “back-end”), when the laburnum shed its poisonous tadpoles; in winter, when the frost candied the grass; in pricking spring and in powdery summer, when each full tree, busy with sanguine birds, became its own forest. And all the while, I looked at Terry's hands, broad with earthy seams.
And that's not all. I would be remiss if I did not tell you about Tom's dad Peter, the academic turned parish priest, who places a sticker on his Bible that reads “This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof,” who keeps a small notebook of all the things he is about to say hidden away in his desk, who came down upon young Tommy in the graveyard like a towering cyclone in his heavy black robes, but who held his hand very sweetly by grandmother's grave. In his reviews of Zadie Smith and Thomas Pynchon, Wood likes to rail against what he has dubbed “hysterical realism,” those cultural theory-laden contemporary novels as busy with vibrant, disposable trivia as your average Us Weekly, but as absent of people as a mall after closing time. So much of modern fiction, he writes, is made up of these “curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things—the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons!—but do not know a single human being.” He favors instead a character-based realism, because he believes that great literature, at once penetrating and generous, searching forward and receding back into itself to make more room, is the best way we have to know another human being. If nothing else, The Book Against God allows us the pleasure of knowing Peter Bunting.
Wood has proven himself more than capable of making human beings. Each character who enters is given a few radiant, telling words. This for a woman who occupies only a page and a half, who comes for dinner and then leaves: “Muriel is very trim, with tiny black lace-up shoes that seem, as is often the case with old ladies, to have become her feet. It is impossible to think of her every taking them off. It is as if her feet are entombed in two little graves.” But we wonder at Tom, who if anything seems a failed version of Wood. For those who have followed Wood's career as a critic, the experience of the novel is sort of like reading one of those old “What If?” Marvel comics, where Peter Parker was never bitten by a radioactive spider at all and ended up just a geeky 40-year-old virgin living in Queens with his widowed Aunt May. Writers, it's true, are as apt to torment themselves with their own degraded clones as they are to create aggrandizing “here's-what-I-would-have-said-next” fantasies: is it possible that in The Book Against God Wood created a man who shared his preoccupations but possessed none of his capabilities? Is it possible that out of himself he created not a Ulysses but some doomed shipmate?
Tom will be fine. Maybe his wife will take him back. Maybe he'll finally finish his thesis. Maybe he'll go back to church. He's a wreck when we leave him where we found him, but he's a far cry from tragedy. There is anguish here, but no kind of danger. Tom, a thinker of some breadth but no depth, and given to tantrums, makes a poor case for atheism, so poor that we wonder if this rotten jerk is actually a case study of the lapsed, now immoral believer. In his review of John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies, Wood wrote that Updike cannot really “imagine God's terrible absence from a life,” and that furthermore “insofar as [he] cannot picture fervent theological fullness; he cannot picture fervent absence.” Wood has imagined in Peter a joyful, generous, and sophisticated theological fullness, but in Tom “atheism” is diagnosed as a grandiose neurosis, a sort of arrested adolescence, not fervent so much as petty and selfish and small. Tom's issues are, after all, more Oedipal than truly metaphysical (the book even ends with a repressed memory all of a sudden bobbing up to the surface). It is therefore a revealing omission that Tom does not seem to be tormented by death without God, by the terrifying prospect that when we close our eyes we simply end. Wood gives us a dead dad, his son full of spleen, and a trip down to the grave but he does not give us Hamlet.
Charitably, we might say that Wood's inexperience as a fiction writer has simply made the narrative too flimsy a platform to support his weighty theological ideas; that the force and coherence of these ideas are lost when parceled out between quotation marks, among all the characters on the page. But then, the Essay itself is a precise, controlled form. It is easy to stay on target, and his reviews come screaming, furious, like jet fighters. The Novel is more like a large crime scene, and the author, whether he knows it or not, leaves incriminating evidence of himself scattered all about. Reading The Book Against God leaves us with the distinct impression that something has been disclosed, however unintentionally. “An extraordinary liberation” is how Tom describes that feeling when he first doubted God's existence at age 13. Likewise, Wood writes in The Broken Estate that when he tore himself away from his belief in God “it was like undressing. You are so quickly, so easily free.” But character and author remain so absolutely God-obsessed. How is this freedom? Tom is like a guy who spends all his time talking to his new girlfriend about his ex. And Wood is not only a critic who wants to be a novelist, but may be, despite himself, just another distraught believer who wants very badly to be an atheist.
Wood will write more novels, I expect, and all of them will worry over God, who will keep quiet. He has written of Melville that he “needed to be braced against the flickering horror of his refusal to believe, and then braced against the sour clarity of his refusal entirely to unbelieve.” This seems from Wood an unburdening of his own, but while his criticism is fraught with an avalanchine ambivalence, he is, in fiction, not yet fearless enough to make himself or us truly, inconsolably afraid of a world that leads to nothing and No One. As a critic, he suffers like a saint, but as a novelist, so smug, too cautious, his hair shirt looks much worse than it is. And having now read The Book Against God we return to find The Broken Estate a diminished work. He remains a startlingly astute reader of certain authors (Woolf, Melville, Chekhov), all of whom have already been many times well read, but he has a very limiting sense of what the novel in its form and content should be allowed to do. His partisan preference for realist and high modernist narratives of belief or unbelief make him a weirdly powerful critic, but a proscribed and tiresome novelist. His fiction is like attending a rather too lengthy meeting of debate club, with each person assigned their point of view, while the very best literature, as he himself has argued, permits a bit of beautiful self-sabotage, where characters wander off to think for themselves, forgetting for a moment they are in a story meant to move forward. There are, after all, no rules as to what makes a novel good. In fact, there are hardly any rules at all as to what makes a novel a novel. It can be one hundred pages or one thousand, can cover the distance from the kitchen to the bed or from Ottawa all the way round to China, can visit pirates' caves or monster lairs, take in crowds or spelunk down inside a single person's head. There are some 615,000 words in the English language alone and an infinite number of sentences: you cannot say that we have yet seen the novel's limits. Wood himself writes, “What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once?” But Wood grants himself no real freedom. His Book Against God has only a small number of words for a small number of thoughts. He is like a man who owns a million acres but spends his days pacing back and forth across only one.
Mark Lotto is Associate Editor at THE PHILADELPHIA INDEPENDENT. He lives in Los Angeles.
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