5.0
The Broken Estate
ByPublisher Description
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief. He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revo-
lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is.
In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.
lutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is.
In the grand tradition of criticism, Wood's work is both commentary and literature in its own right--fiercely written, polemical, and richly poetic in style. This book marks the debut of a masterly literary voice.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities3 Reviews
5.0
Justin
Created over 7 years agoShare
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don Bart
Created about 10 years agoShare
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“James Wood is a remarkable literary critic. He is perhaps the only practitioner of literary criticism writing today who can help a novelist become better. Wood can do this because he has read more, and more originally, than almost anyone in current circulation. Where New York Times columnists and guests write literary reviews that hope someday to grow into cinematic reviews, Wood writes essays about literature.
Here's a long, but I think telling, example from The Broken Estate:
Yet [DH] Lawrence has far greater stylistic powers than Hemingway, and manages simultaneously to be both a purer and a less mannered stylist. Here is Lawrence writing in 1916:
"And then the tussocks and tussocks of primroses are fully out, there is full morning everywhere on the banks and roadsides and streamsides, and around the olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of primrose."
And here is Hemingway, writing in 1929:
"The fields were green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small leaves and a small breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes."
Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both use one word three times ("green" for Hemingway, "primroses" for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway's passage is static. He is layering, using the coincidence of words to suggest a coincidence of colors, a pastoral monotony. But Lawrence's words work against their own repetition, to enact a sense of change and movement. Lawrence is describing the breaking of dawn, the changing of light. This is a verbal discovery. . . . The sentences move toward the light, we move into "a clarity." The language says the same but alters, as light changes but remains the same; Lawrence merely lets us see a word from an improved angle. Repetition is difference. Hemingway, one feels, knows in advance just what his repetitions will be; Lawrence discovers, as he proceeds, that a word has changed its meaning as he has used it, and that he will need to use the same word because it now has a different meaning.
The miracle of this sort of criticism is three-fold. First, Wood loves the prose of Lawrence enough to find just the example he needs. Second, Wood loves the prose of Hemingway enough (even as a reduced artist in Wood's eyes) that he has a ready contrast for Lawrence. But third, and most importantly, Wood understands not only the words but the writers using them well enough to walk us through every mechanical tick of the writers' prose.
I recommend this book to any novelist at any level. It will teach you how to write better characters, and it will remind you how seriously (and severely) good readers may someday read you.”
Patrick Lawlor
Created almost 16 years agoShare
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About James Wood
Born in Durham, England, in 1965, James Wood has been a full-time literary critic since leaving Cambridge University, first at The Guardian in London and currently at The New Republic. His essays and reviews have appeared in a number of other publications, including The New Yorker and The London Review of Books.
Other books by James Wood
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