6 FICTION Politics vs aesthetics

Judging a novel by its author’s own formidable standards

n 1995, when James Wood first arrived in THOMAS MEANEY Like a zealous new district attorney – all right Cold War and the so-called War on Terror, Washington to take up as the post as the de then, enough – he was, shortly after his arrival when, as Fredric Jameson put it, “we could Ifacto lead book critic at the New Republic, James Wood in DC, bringing charges against some of the return to the untroubled cultivation of the aes- American literary criticism was in a mess. Gen- most egregious smugglers of religiosity back thetic as such”. Not long after Francis Fuku- UPSTATE teel, mandarin presences, whose names have 240pp. Cape. £14.99. into literary criticism – Harold Bloom and yama claimed to see the end of history in the disappeared along with the memory of their 978 1 78733 062 7 George Steiner – whose worship at the altar of form of liberal democracy, Wood saw some- pieces, still presided over the major magazines “greatness” turned out to be little more, in thing like the end of the form of the novel in and reviews. Who now scours the archive to see Wood’s view, than the work of vague mystics realism. The comparison is not meant to be what Robert Adams or Robert Towers – or, for the modern novel, he suggested, were the intent on obscuring our sense of the intimate uncharitable. Much as Fukuyama was carica- that matter, John Updike – had to say about any result of their authors cultivating a kind of pro- craft and minute choices behind fictional crea- tured for celebrating the one-size-fits-all novel of the period? Several of the original New ductive imprecision about their being, an indi- tions, of celebrants devoted to the polished impositions of liberal democracy, when he York Intellectuals – Irving Howe, Alfred cation of bottomlessness, in which the product rather than the artifice of the form. If meant only that it was the last ideology left Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag – unknowable triumphed over the knowable, Steiner, one of Wood’s predecessors at the standing capable of attracting new adherents, were still in operation but they no longer and unreliability over transparency. But the New Yorker, was one of the young Wood’s tar- so Wood did not mean that realism was all touched much new fiction, and their vigilance novel was also more than that for Wood: he gets in bravura reputation-crushing, Wood there was left to do in the novel, but that a novel of the social reality around them had precipi- showed how free indirect discourse, when was equally merciless towards another New could only be judged by its relation to the real, tately diminished. The most promising critics managed nimbly enough, could become an Yorker elder for close to the opposite reason. not so much in terms of strict verisimilitude, of the younger generation had moved away enactment of freedom, yielding characters He accused Updike of worshipping a “compla- but in terms of authenticity, or what Wood has from the political preoccupations of their pre- who seemed to exercise a sovereignty that they cent God” and writing fiction that, in its pro- called “an utterly unembarrassed relation to decessors into almost exclusively moral terrain. shared to some tantalizing degree with their miscuous, sensory overflow that swallowed the mundane”. Much as Fukuyama still saw What was an acceptable way to fictionalize the creators. One of the reasons Wood has taken his characters, threatened to make all of its plenty of room for wars and conflict after the experience of the Holocaust? How would the such an interest in an imperviously religious dramatizations of the agony of faith appear End of History, Wood saw ample space for lit- internet ruin reading? What happened when novelist such as Marilynne Robinson is that like one shiny, smooth surface. (This dissent erary experimentation in the End of Form. you wrote an incest novel without irony? Robinson tries to reclaim some of these secular on Updike separated Wood from Updike “Realism is not a law”, he liberally decreed, Wood immediately registered as a different virtues of the novel as mislabelled religious admirers such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan “but a lenient tutor, for it schools its own tru- quantity: a rigorous aesthetician, a disciplined gifts (a kind of Protestant religious freedom). and Christopher Hitchens, and showed that he ants. It is realism that allows surrealism, magic swooner, he appealed not only to argument but realism, fantasy, dream, and so on.” tested the reading experience against the The problem for Wood today is that politics actual, lived experience of the world. Beyond – concerns about the proper shape and priori- simply fulfilling the basic duty of the reviewer, ties of our society – have returned to the con- which Edmund Wilson once described as temporary novel with little warning, in ways “establishing identities for books”, Wood he could hardly have anticipated on setting out came closer than anyone to fulfilling Henry as a critic. The period of the “untroubled culti- James’s maxim that criticism should serve as vation of the aesthetic”, a time for which Wood “the beautiful gate to enjoyment”. If this were was finely matched, now appears to have been a James Wood review, now would come the more of an exception than a norm. His earlier Hussar-dash of simile: James Wood was like sense that history was on his side is on display an early-career Jesuit gunning for a Bishop- in his pieces that engage the tradition of Amer- ric, dispatched to restore order to dissonant ican political-literary criticism. In a notable congregations, swinging his thurible with essay on Edmund Wilson, for instance, in steady intensity, reintroducing pungencies we 2005, Wood regretted Wilson’s “swerve away had all but forgotten back into our deprived from aesthetic questions”, and worried that nostrils. Unlike that of so many of the critics political literary criticism risked reducing around him, Wood’s felt much closer to the itself to mere journalism. (The title of Wood’s writing of writers. His “writer’s criticism”, as new novel, Upstate, is a deliberate echo of he called it, bustled with elaborate metaphors Wilson’s own memoir of the same name, and brazen generalities. His summaries of though Wood does not seem to have chosen novels often competed with the plots them- this title in any discernibly competitive way; selves. In Wood’s view, part of the underlying it’s more like a playful genuflection to a local health of any novel was its ability to survive spirit.) But in a world in which the foundations this exercise, which he called “passionate of liberal democracy appear – once again – redescription”. By the late 1990s it was almost much less stable, it is striking to read the old beside the point that he signed his name to his political-literary criticism of the New York pieces: we knew him by the style alone. Intellectuals and to see how alert they were to What distinguished Wood from most of his what Trilling called the bloody crossroads contemporaries and immediate predecessors James Wood where literature and politics meet. In 1957 was his focus on matters of aesthetic liberty Irving Howe published an entire book (Poli- over social justice, and the suggestion that The brisk, dictatorial narration of Muriel belonged to something more than the English tics and the Novel) in response to Stendhal’s there was a choice to be made between them. Spark’s fiction likewise earns Wood’s cult of the mid-century American sentence.) remark that “Politics in a literary work is like He once described the “formal task” of fiction approval because her characters are equipped More than anything else, for Wood, Updike a gun shot in the middle of a concert, some- as the establishment of “a licensed freedom”. to outwit her own batterings. In these gaps of failed in the novelistic duty of helping readers thing vulgar, but something impossible to By this he meant that the novel is an art form self-knowledge, which readers can fill in for to appreciate the arc of their own lives and, just ignore”; Alfred Kazin’s essay of 1942 on that, through its very method, can avoid the themselves, Wood sees opportunity for the a little bit, their own deaths. Willa Cather seems a more capacious polit- theological and ideological impulse by cleav- kind of improved, novelistic consciousness But as untimely and refreshingly unfashion- ical-literary meditation now than when it was ing to uncertainty, multiplicity, doubt. The that can heighten readers’ sensitivities to the able as Wood once seemed at his entry into the written. When one compares Wood to the New novel, he wrote, “moves in the shadow of real world, granting them “an almost priestly American scene, he may have pushed less York critics in their full bloom, he can appear doubt, knows itself to be a true lie”, and it is advantage over people’s souls”. against the period than at first appeared. For suddenly narrower: it is hard to imagine him, here, for Wood, that the form’s fealty to the Since the beginning, Wood has sought to the short 1990s, for those distant enough from say, reviewing a contemporary historian with real can be found – a fealty that he sees as guard literature against claims of its being a its violent implosions, now seems like a the virtuosic ease of Kazin on Perry Miller or fiercely secular. The most alive characters in kind of canonical religion, or pseudo-religion. sojourn from History, a caesura between the Mary McCarthy on David Halberstam. And,

TLS APRIL 6 2018 8 FICTION unlike, say, Steiner or Sontag, he is more reli- into being. His impatience with conventional ant on translations into English. Ten years ago narration, empty lyricism and “hysterical” or many of the leading critics and novelists in “paranoid” realism is shared by the most America held Wood in the highest esteem, and innovative cohort of contemporary novelists. several tried to sound like him. But for the new Whether Wood was a prime mover behind the critics and novelists now emerging, does new wave of first-person “auto-fiction” is Wood matter as much as he once did? doubtful, but the rise of this sort of fiction clearly pleases him. His vaunted “reliably unre- here is something uncomfortable in liable” and “unreliably unreliable” narrators Wood’s pieces these days, as if he now crop up everywhere. There is the peripa- Tknows he must somehow account for tetic Nigerian-American narrator of Teju the political turn of novels, but is unsure how to Cole’s Open City, who is ambivalent about integrate these concerns into his deep aesthetic being claimed by any group, or any political commitments. Here is a recent piece on Jenny cause that sounds too shrill; the exhausted aes- Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone – about thete alter ego of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My refugees in Europe – which begins with Wood Struggle, who is occasionally exhausted by the telling of a recent family vacation in Italy: bien-pensant feminist politics of Stockholm’s We saw the young men everywhere in that Ital- bourgeoisie; and the protagonist of Ben Ler- ian hinterland – usually in groups of two or three, ner’s 10:04, who has a similar – though funnier walking along the road, climbing the hills, sit- – circling pattern as Wood when confronted ting on a wall. They were tall, dark-skinned, con- with radical politics. spicuous because they were wearing too many The point is not that we need more criticism clothes for the warm Riviera weather. We in league with some great political pro- learned that they had made their way to Italy gramme, nor, as Wood once wrote mockingly from various African countries and were now of Jonathan Franzen, that there should be “a desperate to get into France, either to stay there kind of competition between the novel and or to push on farther, to Britain and Germany. society”. “The artist who wrote a novel called This reads as if the critic were learning of such Vive the Dole would, most probably, find that deprivations for the very first time. But then his work died with the death of the specific sit- Wood continues, stressing that he does, after uation for which it was written”, Kenneth all, read the news: Burke wrote in 1931. Novels need not make I had read moving articles and essays about the amends to the savagely named Miss Kilman in plight of people like these – I had read several of Mrs Dalloway. But as Burke sensed in his own those pieces out loud to my children; I had time, “a system of aesthetics subsumes a watched terrible reports from the BBC, and the system of politics”, and a novel can show the almost unbearable Italian documentary “Fire at way impersonal claims of politics submit to Sea.” And so what? What good are the right feel- the pressures of private emotions and vice ings if they are only right feelings? I was just a versa. There can, in other words, be some moral flaneur. From inside my speeding car, I fertile doubting about the existence of the regarded those men with compassion, shame, aesthetic–political divide. Wood is hardly indignation, curiosity, profound ignorance, all oblivious of this. But when he praises the of it united in a conveniently vague conviction powers of free indirect discourse as a literary that, as Edward VIII famously said of mass technique – one that, correctly employed, unemployment in the nineteen-thirties, “some- allows characters autonomy that blurrily over- thing must be done.” But not so that it would dis- laps with the authority of the novelist – he turb my week of vacation. I am like some “flat” tends to avoid any question of the liberal poli- character in a comic novel, who sits every night tics built into that style. The risk with free indi- at the dinner table and repetitively, despicably rect discourse in today’s atmosphere of de jure intones, without issue or effect, “This is the cen- liberalism is that each major character’s con- tral moral question of our time.” And, of course, sciousness must be treated with equal access such cleansing self-reproach is merely part of by the omniscient narrator, such that a kind of liberalism’s dance of survival. It’s not just that representative political utopia of equality is we are morally impotent; the continuation of our mapped onto the novel, giving it the polished comfortable lives rests on the continuation – on feel of a form that, whatever themes or subjects the success – of that impotence. We see suffering it treats, presumes social stability, and is not only intermittently, and our days make safe given to the wild plunges of narrative upheaval spaces for these interruptions. that appear in, say, Dostoevsky, where a char- What is happening here? Wood seems to be acter appears to take control of the text for indicting the participants in “liberalism’s dance pages at a time. of survival” and, at the same time, with mus- When it comes to the return of politics as a tered honesty, including himself among those dominant force in the novel, Wood seems guilty of negligence and collusion. But the cri- somewhat unprepared. Even when he tique ends right as it begins: with a palpitation responds, at times acutely, to overtly political of political concern. After this passage, Wood fiction – such as that by Zia Haider Rahman, turns to the novel at hand. It is as if, in calling Hari Kunzru, Joshua Cohen, or his beloved attention to the inadequacy of his politics, he has Norman Rush – his attention tends to be drawn somehow discharged his critical duty, and even to the politics of the self (or to the limits poli- suggested that there is no real alternative to his tics imposes on the self) rather than the larger circling conscience, which, he assures us, will political and historical canvas on which these continue to spin. authors work. And in his rapturous responses But there is more than that. For over the years to, for example, W. G. Sebald’s haunted the fiction that Wood has championed has con- chronicles, we might even say that he likes his tained some of qualities of the passage above: politics served well done, with questions no politically ambivalent, rich in psychology. longer live, the passion already spent. The rea- Wood, more than any other major contem- sons for this may have something to do with the porary critic, has had the rare satisfaction of fact that he has devoted so much time to pursu- having much of the very sort of work he called ing another, older question: the problem of for in How Fiction Works (2008) actually come belief in God, as opposed to the belief in poli-

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tics, which he often makes seem like the more Wood has stacked some of the environment ing, however inexpertly, the source and poss- bowl’s delicate rim jumped into Helen’s lap. “I antique concern. In his first novel, The Book to his advantage, allowing his mild Bellovian- ible balms of Vanessa’s crisis. Alan is a man have it,” she said, and carefully put her fingers Against God (2003) – Bellovian in its intellec- ism to feed the American landscape through who has benefited from and participated in the around its parched, new edges. tual yearning, though anti-Bellovian in its fun- Alan’s middle-class English eyes. Wood, via Thatcherite revolution to the best of his abili- Vanessa stood still and lamented, “My favor- damental tidiness – Wood brilliantly parodied Alan, does a lot of “serious noticing” in this ties, destroying many of the sorts of buildings ite bowl! The only one I cared about.” the situation of a God-haunted secularist like novel. He notices, for example, the “pleated, he most admired to bring in the new. Wood Josh said that they could easily fix it; Alan his own critical alter ego. But in his more laugh-like noises” of sheep in Northumber- captures the ethos of a figure who is tired of all added that she wouldn’t be able to see the crack. recent writing – the several New Yorker pieces land, and the “wasteful slippage of the big this talk of leaving a light carbon footprint Helen, rubbing her fingers along the chalky that present sketches of his childhood spent in automatic V8” in New York (Wood is very when he prefers the idea of leaving a “very big shard, rather enjoyed the trivial torment. the shadow of Durham Cathedral, where he good on cars). The American sky strikes him footprint”, and who looks back with a kind of “You don’t understand. It’s not the bowl. Of grew up in a religious household – his back- as “therapeutic blue”; watching television he pity at the foreshortened vision of the working- course I can go to the potter who made it and get ground increasingly features as a well-worn finds “the colors were more garish than on the class men of his childhood which he dimly another one – he lives nearby. It’s the idea: exotic artefact for his secular American read- English telly – almost what he thought of as an remembers as a kind of underworld: everything that is most dear to you will event- ers. Here is Wood, in full exhibition mode, in Arab brightness in the lighting”. There is a In truth, he’d always been a bit wary of the ually be taken from you.” “The Nearest Thing to Life”: kind of doubling down on the New York- Socialist Hall and Café. The seats there were “Then that’s a very important lesson to learn,” When I asked where God came from, my mother under-European-eyes technique that won communal wooden pews, and the thin men sat said Helen, without emotion. showed me her wedding ring, and suggested Joseph O’Neill such acclaim in Netherland – next to each other, and they all looked the same “Fuck it, leave me alone,” replied Vanessa. that, like it, God had no beginning or end. (But not least from Wood. In some moments Alan’s to him. They sat at their tea and bread-and-butter “All right, I’m going for a little walk,” said I knew that someone had made the ring, even if noticing becomes almost too baroque, as if (Alan was wondrously allowed a stotty cake), Alan, who took his coat and woolen cap and I didn’t say so.) When I asked about famines Wood were deliberately botching it, as when with the same studious poverty, wearing the almost ran for the door. and earthquakes, my father told me, correctly he finds himself being driven through a “long same flat caps, their faces pale as string, patient, This is a sharp but stagey moment, where we enough, that humans were often politically sour tunnel, and suddenly with a few large humorous, modest – and finally conservative watch as Wood’s precision (“parched, new responsible for the former and, in the case of the bumps they were in the middle of the city, . . . as Alan saw it, they wanted more money and edges”) gets squandered by a kind of theatrical latter, were often to blame for continuing to live which was like heaven and hell combined, jobs so that the smoky underlit important mono- laziness (“almost ran for the door”). Vanessa, in notoriously unstable areas. Well, so much for infernal but glittering with lights”. A wonder- tony of things could continue just the same as who tries to bring the “teaching moment” home remediable poverty and pestilence, but what ful metaphorical hazarding comes aboard a before. to the tough crowd that is her family, snaps about cancer, mental and physical handicap, northbound Amtrak train, when Alan returns back into her shell. You begin to long to be back awful accident . . . . I was told that God’s ways from the bar car holding “a soi-disant Danish” his feels true and persuasive as a depic- in the Wood/Alan retrospective mode, when are incomprehensible and that, in many cases, a and Helen watches it “sugar-sweating inside tion of soft neoliberal condescension we can take in a more textured perspective. Job-like humility before the incomprehension its clear plastic wrap”. Some of Alan’s philos- Ttowards a presumed socialist nirvana – Those of Helen and even Vanessa, which must be cultivated. But Job was a complainer opher-daughter’s vocabulary seems to slip a cool glance at what Wood has called else- become, I think, unintentionally indistinct in before he was a saint or stoic, and I fear that my into his usage, as when he considers the snow- where “the slow rotting of the ideological har- this novel, seem to show up the whole problem childish questioning got permanently jammed in fall in New York as a kind of “negation”, but by vest”. Upstate never carries explicit wisdom of free indirect discourse too rigorously appor- the position of metaphysical complaint. the time Alan is surveying his daughter’s bath- about how the hallowed deprivations of his tioned. Sharply individuated characters are This thwarted unspooling of the moth-eaten room with the eyes of a contractor, dismally youth made Alan – and much of his generation hardly required in a good realist novel, except brocade is very fine, but by this point in his noting the poor materials, he is by far the most – the sort of people who get deep thrills from when the premiss is psychological depth. Like- career, Wood has presented us these wares so sovereign and interesting character in this luxury, which in its turn triggers a new genera- wise, free indirect style does not demand equal often that it’s become a bit of a wearying book, its undeniable beating heart. tional cycle of political purification. opportunity – there is Madame Bovary – but wind-up routine that almost slips into self-flat- Alan is strong-minded and positive, to the Upstate is set in the winter of 2007 before when it is used in such a way it can become an tery. The Ivan Karamazov side of Wood wants point that his talent for maintaining the buoy- Lehman Brothers collapsed. It includes some unwelcome source of tidiness. Each of the three to know why God makes famines and will not ancy of his moods becomes an obstacle for political dinner discussions when Vanessa and major players in Upstate gets their representa- be satisfied by prevarications involving poli- taking the drama of the depressed philosopher- Josh chirp on about the prospects of Barack tion, gets their voice, but it is Josh, and Alan’s tics: so it was in Wood’s youth and so it daughter with full weight, or at least as much Obama taking office. We have seen these same wife, who vibrate more memorably, while the remains. For in Wood-World the ideal is to be weight as Wood seems to accord it. Vanessa kinds of discussion in McEwan’s Saturday town drunk who randomly encounters Alan at a metaphysical complainer who has some appears, at first, to have been contrived as a and O’Neill’s Netherland, but where both of his hotel provides a welcome patch of anarchy. underlying theology to grouse about and reject kind of unfathomable Dostoevskean heroine those authors used such vignettes to look in If being the leading critic-novelist of Amer- – and he gives off the sense of half-pitying his who promises an upsetting of the bounds of askance at the opposition to George W. Bush’s ica means every once in a while delivering a readers whose concerns were not forged in the what is otherwise, in large part, a drawing- wars, Wood forces these scenes into place with novel that shows you understand the follies and same kiln, and who thus may miss out on the room novel. She is the metaphysical com- the cruel lever of distance: the naivety is laid vast smugness of the middle class in the heart- finer tints of his unique personal glaze. plainer in the drama, or as one of her favourite out like the rest of the dinner spread. It is break house of capitalist culture then perhaps philosophers might have put it, she is prey to Vanessa’s crisis of personal belief that is Wood has done his work: this novel is, in terms pstate is a family drama, modest in “madness that may actually occur if the inertial meant to be the novel’s problem, but it is grad- of sheer writerly execution, better than Wil- scope and written, you sense, fully force of taking the world and life for granted is ually overtaken, as the book unfolds, by both son’s Memoirs of Hecate Country, better than Ucognizant of the scrutiny that will somehow lost”. This madness has shown itself Josh and Alan’s inability to face up to it – a fail- Trilling’s Middle of the Journey, and better attend every move made in it. Wood once in what may have been an intentional act of ure of male understanding, perhaps, but one than Sontag’s The Volcano Lover. Yet it does mocked J. M. Coetzee for Disgrace, which he self-harm. It might have been more persuasive that is moving partly for the sensitivity with not appear very different from the recent fic- claimed read like “the winner of an exam if Wood had kept the dimensions of her which the failing is felt by all the characters. If tion by O’Neill and Jonathan Dee, who confi- whose challenge was to create the perfect rep- depressive episodes more opaque, but this – in The Book Against God was Wood’s novel that, dently play us back the society around us. For resentative of a very good contemporary a sense – is where the politics begin to come in. in its very telling, confronted a running con- Wood politics has become a kind of draught novel”. With Upstate, Wood must be aware In her childhood, she was half in love with a cern in his criticism – the problem of freedom that he allows to waft through Upstate from that any novel which appeared to hew too boy from a working-class family and Alan, – Upstate diverts from this problem to the time to time, and that even drags parts of his closely to the instructions of his own starter-kit determined to climb socially, forced her to question of individual happiness, and to the story forwards, but one that feels distinct from How Fiction Works would breach the territory break off relations with the philosophically most mysterious variety of happiness, family real life. The sense of complacency that per- of self-parody. The protagonist is Alan inclined youth. She has been suffering from happiness. vades Upstate may partly have to do with the Querry, a real estate mogul of the second tier, that parting, and Alan’s from her mother, ever This kind of theme might be enough to sus- way Wood’s narration reflects his resigned lib- who works in Durham, has a big old house; a since. In contrast, Helen has apparently been tain an entire novel, but the shortcomings of eral politics, each character a sealed compart- new New Agey wife; an estranged, dead one; thriving as a mother and a music executive, Upstate are a product of the kind of theatricali- ment, which closes when the next opens. It is and two daughters. The older daughter except that it turns out that she, too, harbours a ties that intrude on it; the way that scenes that not a defence of liberal values, like Trilling’s Vanessa is a philosophy professor at Skid- few of her own grievances: mainly that her might have been better if reflected in one of the agonizing Journey, but something closer to an more, in upstate New York, and has had some passion for pop music is not adequately appre- characters’ minds have been flattened and index of Wood’s stoical posture towards the kind of mental breakdown. Vanessa’s younger ciated by the family, a failing accentuated cheapened by their narration in a kind of stan- way we live. As a balm we get to marvel a bit boyfriend, Josh, has contacted Alan and Helen, when Alan, in financial straits, backs out of dardized omniscience. Here, for instance, is a at what Wood has reclaimed from “the unaes- the younger, London-based music executive lending her money to start a new music family scene, at the dinner table: thetic here and now”. With the New York Crit- daughter, asking them to visit and help to bring company geared to internet audiences. Helen was enjoying a measure of righteous ics there was wilder reaching, and less calm. her back from the brink. The entire novel takes The success of much of this novel lies in grievance when Vanessa, who was one-hand- Politics in the novel may be like a gunshot, but place over five days, as Alan meets Helen in Alan’s Zeus-like position of keeping the peace edly clearing plates from the table, stumbled in James Wood’s second novel its weak rico- New York and the two of them journey north between his daughters, gently sizing up the slightly and dropped a small celadon-green chet feels like a dodge from one of our most and stay at Vanessa’s ramshackle house. charming if ultimately elusive Josh, and prob- bowl. It hit Josh’s lap, and a tiny piece of the arresting writers.

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