His Woodness

James Wood is everywhere, even on my frigging fiction shelf. The man anointed his holy critic on high for the moribund art of highbrow literature does his New Yorker work, publishes deconstruction manuals on how fiction works, and receives polite blow jobs from almost everyone who mentions his name in print. The repressed jealousy of failed academics in rent-controlled flats must be straining at the superego’s bit. I thought I’d check out his one novel to see how it illustrates his instructions for producing great fiction, but I got sidetracked by the unreliable narrator’s ongoing feud with his father and the lord. The Book Against God does the irony thick, as our protagonist is a first-rate jackass who can’t finish his Ph.D, tell his wife the truth or make her pregnant, or bathe. And yet, he delivers the atheist’s case against his beloved (at least by everyone else) father, a man who delights all in his company and is quick with the turned phrase. How can you root for the shitheel against the saint? Well, unfortunately, the theodicy discussions are pretty thin, as Wood did a far better job on Job in viciously slamming Bart Ehrman’s new book. We get inside Tom’s head for his grievances against his earthly and divine fathers, but the greatest potential to explore the theological questions in any depth comes in several conversations that are truncated by events. I wish he had gone deeper. There is little plot, so as a novel of ideas we’re left with character, and Wood simply does not unravel Tom as masterfully as Ford does in The Good Soldier, which must be a model for this work. I enjoyed the delicate humor and a few of the minor characters (especially one scholar who chafes at the time waste of human contact), but the debate isn’t rich enough, the story doesn’t exist, and our narrator entirely lacks charm. Read the essays instead.