BOOK OF THE MONTH
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
by James Wood
Jonathan Cape (0224064509)
Reviewer: JEREMY TAGG (Bibliographer, Lindsay and Croft)
These are promising times for lovers of the literary essay. In the last few years, the great Romantic essayist William Hazlitt has been honoured with new, scholarly editions of his writings, while his grave at St Anne's Church, Soho has been restored with the support of the Guardian newspaper and its readers. Meanwhile, the London Review of Books, in which reviews are really opportunities for expansive essays, is flourishing and emulated by at least one broadsheet newspaper in its weekend books supplement.
James Wood proves that it is possible to succeed as a 'man of letters' outside academia in the twenty-first century. Over the last 13 years he has produced reviews and essays on a remarkable range of authors for the Guardian (where he became Chief Literary Critic while still in his mid-twenties), the London Review of Books and the New Republic. His first collection of essays, 'The Broken Estate' (1999), ranged from Thomas More to Thomas Pynchon, by way of Austen, Flaubert, Chekhov and Gogol, with the relationship between literature and religious belief as a loosely unifying theme.
His marvellous new book, The Irresponsible Self, shows the same readiness to discuss British and American authors alongside European authors in translation, in a manner that invites comparison with the criticism of V.S. Pritchett, whose short stories are credited here with 'broadening, Russianising, internationalising English comedy'. Once again, there are common themes to the essays: the evolution of a humane 'comedy of forgiveness' in which the reader momentarily shares rather than laughs at a character's absurdities; and the attempts by writers to represent human consciousness in all its tragic-comic waywardness, particularly through the interior monologue.
The new collection begins by suggesting how Shakespeare bequeathed to the modern novel the notion of 'a soliloquising world, in which people speak at rather than to each other' and risked allowing characters to display a 'rambling consciousness', replete with useless minutiae and irrelevant digressions. Wood then leads us through the fictional worlds of a number of nineteenth and early twentieth-century European novelists, where we are exposed to the psychological oddities and random thought patterns of distinctly unreliable characters, but without any authorial judgement to reassure us. At the heart of this section are essays on Italo Svevo's neurotic protagonists, like the celebrated Zeno, who deludes himself into believing that he is writing a candid confession of his early life, as requested by his psychoanalyst; Knut Hamsun's wildly unpredictable narrators; Giovanni Verga's unsentimental, seemingly callous stories of Sicilian rural poverty, narrated as if from within that community; and Bohumil Hrabal's voluble, yearning fantasists.
Just over halfway through the book, Wood turns his attention to recent British and American fiction and coins the phrase 'hysterical realism' to describe how proliferating anecdotes and an excess of information have supplanted the richness of character that he values in fiction. He is scathingly funny about the shallowness of Tom Wolfe's and Salman Rushdie's recent novels. 'Unfortunately, Wolfe's characters only feel one emotion at a time; their inner lives are like jingles for the self', Wood laments. 'As Picasso had his Blue Period, so Wolfe's characters have their Angry Period, or their Horny Period, or their Sad Period'. Among recent fiction, only Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' seems to herald a return to a proper attention to character, with a deceptively simple narrative that registers the bewilderment of a young woman transplanted to London from a village in Bangladesh. He ends his collection on a happier note, returning to more congenial masters of individual character and stream of consciousness: Saul Bellow, V.S. Pritchett and Henry Green.
Wood writes with infectious gusto, flitting from one passage to another to illustrate an author's style, or lingering over every nuance of a single sentence, as he does at the start of his essay on Hrabal. 'Such are the goods packed in a typical comic sentence' by the great Czech novelist, he explains. Just as Wood writes appreciatively of the metaphors in Joseph Roth's novels, he also takes pleasure in fashioning colourful phrases of his own. Coleridge's prose 'is a junction-box of inheritances, full of magical combinations'. Hamsun's characters 'are epistemological brawlers, always challenging meaning to a fight'. Astonished by the consistency of verbal inventiveness in one of Bellow's novels, he remarks: 'Good writers tend to raise one up like canal-locks, so that one swims at their level, and forgets the medium that supports one'. It comes as no surprise to discover that Wood has also tried his hand at a novel, 'The Book Against God' (2003), so vivid are many of his observations on other writers.
Like all the most readable essayists on literature (Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, Pritchett), James Wood sends us back to those authors that we have read before and in search of those that are new to us; and then back to his collections of essays once again.
Previous reviews:
Representations of G.F. Watts: Art making in Victorian culture edited by Colin Trodd
Beef and Liberty by Ben Rogers
Paradise & Power by Robert Kagan
London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
Degrees in Violence by David Blair
Slipstream — A Memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard
