The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood (PDF)

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Each chapter takes on a author/an book(s) by an author to form some sort of argument regarding their use of belief, either in the religious sense or in terms of fictional belief in characters. While many chapters are quite good, one would be wise to take some of what James Wood writes with a grain of salt. His immense love of Chekhov for instance essentially deifies him as a author whose characters act outside of their roles as people in a book. This in spite of the fact that an early work of James Wood’s (“How Fiction Works”) already undercuts such love of characters as “real people”. In a way this book, more so then “How Fiction Works” or “The Fun Stuff” represents Wood’s personal opinions of authors and what their writing shows you. He still provides amazing details, and connects ideas across books (again generally, as the Herman Melville is essentially Wood shoe-horning as much religious connotation into “Moby Dick” as he can find support for). You likely then will like it, so long as you don’t except the arguments/ideas to be anything more then what he sees.

⭐Criticism for people who want to read something smart and insightful about books. It’s a book for those who appreciate thinking long and deep about literature, who appreciate being introduced to aspects of language and content they may never have previously considered, who take literature seriously and feel no need to apologize for it. There simply is no critic writing today as consistently well about literature as Mr. Wood and this book is a perfect introduction to why he has acquired such a reputation at such a comparatively young age. You may find yourself disagreeing but you will be forced to think hard as to why.

⭐Whatever happened to the tradition of morally serious criticism most famously exemplified by F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling? What happened to those critics whose essays exemplified what Joseph Epstein has called “gravity”? Well, in Epstein’s case he succumbed to the malevolent ideological miasma of Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. Leavis’ influence declined as a result of his parochialism, his narrow concentration on a few English writers, and his rather hostile and paranoid attitude towards criticism. As academics concentrated more and more on trying to define what literature, many of the forums for the public intellectual took an increasingly hysterical and demagogic attitude towards modern literary theory. Given the New York Review of Books’ notorious reluctance to attract new talent, and the ideological prejudices of the American right, where is a new critic going to come from?James Wood is one such critic, and to say he is one of the best contributors to the New Republic is not praise enough. Better to say that he reminds one of the New Republic when it was an honest magazine. Intelligent, thoughtful, morally serious, his collection does not show all his virtues. It does not include his witty evisceration of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, which demonstrates the difference between a flashy journalist and a real novelist. A great critic tries to remind us of the unaccountably neglected and the forgotten. The only essay here which does that is a fine one on the great Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. (Later essays on Giovanni Verga and Henry Green were written after this book was published.) Wood grew up in an English evangelical household and gradually lost his faith in God’s existence. The nonconformist attitudes still remain though, with sometimes unhelpful results. An essay on Thomas More comes close to blaming him for not being a Protestant, and it is based on a dated Protestant historiography of the Reformation that has come under severe challenge from Eamon Duffy, Alexander Walsham and Christopher Haigh. This moralism leaks into his review of Morrison’s Paradise, where he criticizes for being insufficiently judgmental.But the one essay that is truly unforgivably flawed is “Half Against Flaubert.” Wood castigates Flaubert for being heartless, unsympathetic, morally empty. That he could make these judgements without reference to Flaubert’s “Three Tales” is absurd. It would be like discussing Tolstoy without reference to “The Death of Ivan Illych.” Aside from insinuating that Flaubert is metaphorically guilty of the Catholic and monastic heresy of flagellation, Wood’s criticisms of A Sentimental Education is singularly obtuse. He cites Henry James criticism, as if it were obvious that James was Flaubert’s superior. “The only burning question of Sentimental Education is whether Frederic is going to have sex with his various lovers.” No, the burning question is whether there is Frederic Moreau’s life and anything in Orleanist and Second Empire France that can preserve him from being suffocated by a heartless conservative mediocrity. Reading this essay in the New Republic I was struck by the fact that this journal was one that looked like it has been edited by A Sentimental Education’s cast. It certainaly has more of its share of Naive Moreaus, ruthlessly fashionably Roques, fanatical turncoat Seneschals and unsuccessful opportunistic Deslauriers. To say that Moreau is “bland” misses the point. Many people are, and many more are made that way by the world. At one point Wood praises the moral intelligence of Jane Austen and praises’ James’ creation of Gilbert Osmond as a truly evil character. In contrast to Flaubert, cannot one say that James and Austen rig the sentiments slightly? Would we feel that Osmond was so evil is he had not married someone as unusually beautiful and sensitive as Isabel Archer?Otherwise, what we do have here are a collection of interesting and thoughtful essays. D.H. Lawrence is given a sympathetic hearing which helps counter the view that he drowned his gifts in a lunatic, misogynistic quasi-fascism. Gogol, Chekhov and Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre are all intelligently appreciated. George Steiner, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison are all intelligently criticized, a virtue to be appreciated when many of Wood’s colleagues at the New Republic and the New Criterion would simply castigate them for having opinions more liberal than Madeline Albright. For those who think John Updike can never be castigated enough, they will find witty confirmation from Wood. (“Sex exists for Updike as grass does, or the metallic sheen of an air-conditioning unit. This is not philosophical at all, but a rather boring paganism, which finds the same degree of sensuality in everything.”)

⭐James Wood takes up the question of the novel and faith in this excellent collection of essays. Perhaps more philosophical here than usual, Wood still demonstrates why he is the most insightful and eloquent commentator of fiction. His criticisms of Morrison, Pynchon, and Dellilo encapsulate what is so often wrong with contemporary American fiction. The American novel has unfortunately descended into a lumping amalgam of ostentatious allegories and social commentaries. Our most esteemed writers seem to have lost touch with the basic elements that make great fiction tick: character, description, mystery. On the other hand, Wood reserves kind words for truly fine novelists like Henry Green and Iris Murdoch; he also makes decidedly uncontroversial appraisals of Gogol, Hamsun, Melville, and Austin. He is more critical of Flaubert than usual, drawing out what he perceives to be some of the problems of realism in a great work like ‘A Sentimental Education.’ James Wood is always interesting and erudite. ‘The Broken Estate’ is an enormously accomplished collection of criticism.

⭐Great essay in mostly all my favorite English speaking author, and some Russian. I would have liked somebody else, I mean from other culture and language, but ok, maybe next time, but no, Thomas Mann is not enough.Grande saggio che racconta e approfondisce quasi tutti i miei autori inglesi preferiti, e qualche russo. La prossima volta non mi dispiacerebbe qualche altro autore, magari di una cultura diversa e no, thomas Mann non é abbastanza.

⭐Excellent,stimulating and learned. I don’t always agree with Wood , but her writes very well indeed, and always throws light in dark corners.

⭐Good condition.

⭐Some of the finest essays by one of the finest minds.

⭐Brilliant hardcover clean copy; love getting books from this vendor!

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