There are times when I find myself wondering what James Wood would think. The circumstances of this kind of questioning vary. For example, I may be in the middle of writing a story when it suddenly will occur to me that a sentence feels inauthentic to the way a character would think, or that the prose itself—its music, its meaning, or, alas, both—has gotten sloppy, and therefore false. Or: I may be reading a novel, whether for the first or for the fourteenth time, and will realize that I have allowed whole pages to go by without reading as carefully as I ought. And, more often than not, after asking myself the question, I’ll go back. I’ll rewrite the sentence. I’ll reread the pages. The circumstances vary, but the question remains the same: what would Wood think? And then, depending on the day, I follow that first question with another: why on earth do I care?

There are others who care, and more may start caring. For those who do not already know, James Wood, born in Great Britain, 42 years old, is a prominent literary critic who is soon to become more prominent; he recently has left his post of twelve years at The New Republic for The New Yorker, where he will now be writing for a larger audience. In the meantime, in some literary circles, bringing up James Wood may be as good a way as any to provoke a brawl. His admirers are manifold, but his detractors may be as many, and as adamant. On the one hand, the New York Review of Books has styled Wood “perhaps the strongest and strangest literary critic we have,” the New York Observer praised him as a “blessing to the culture,” and the likes of Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow have agreed on his virtues as a critic. On the other hand, Salon has called him “monkishly circumscribed” and the literary blog The Reading Experience has dubbed him, more plainly, “remarkably intolerant” and “a hanging judge.” It is difficult to think of another literary critic who has had not one but two publications (The Believer and n+1) devote space in their inaugural issues to discussions of his demerits.

Wood inspires this level of passion at least partly because he is so decided—some would say dogmatic— a critic. He makes a religion of literature. Wood has written before about his upbringing in an evangelical sect of the Church of England, and about his subsequent and painful apostasy; in one book of criticism, The Broken Estate, he argues that meaningful engagement with literature has replaced interaction with religion; his first and thus far only novel is called The Book Against God. The absence of God, it seems, looms so large for Wood as to be a presence. It has become a commonplace to say that Wood has fashioned a substitute religion out of literature; less often noted is that he brings an evangelical zeal to his criticism. His essays reveal a fervor that would also be apposite to the pulpit. He excoriates, he admonishes, he despairs, he encourages, he acclaims. In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Wood has said as much: “There is an evangelical streak in me that wants to correct reviewers, ‘You have to see it this way. You have to see that X is good and Y is bad and you have to agree with me.’”

But as with many an evangelist, his condemnations can, at least at first, seem to ring louder than his encomiums. The list of the novelists he has censured includes some of the most glittering names of the literati: Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, and on and on. It is notable, though, that he bases both his praising and his panning on underlying principles about fiction, and about what fiction ought to be. Adam Kirsch, book critic of The New York Sun and author of The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets, noted in an email interview with Small Spiral Notebook that Wood is “one of the only literary critics today who makes judgments from first principles – not just judgments of taste, but reasoned judgments about the nature of fiction.”

So what are the first principles of James Wood? For one, he is very interested in the exploration of character, the attempt to explore the consciousness of the other that Hegel saw as so critical to our understanding of ourselves. In his second book of criticism, The Irresponsible Self, he writes that fiction “continues to believe in the revelation of character, continues to believe that the attempt to know a character is worthwhile, even if it is beautifully frustrated.” Anton Chekhov, who inhabited his characters so fully as to make them seem uninhabited and unhostaged, is beloved: Chekhov “sees the world not as a writer might see it but as one of his characters might.” Writers with a penchant for stocking their novels with flat types, cartoons—Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe—are taken to task for overindulging in characters who “fail to be… individual,” and “are skins only, pithless.” Exciting, exact, beautiful language is praised; for example, Wood singles out the beauty of Saul Bellow’s prose, “its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself.” Furthermore, the best fictional language ought also to retain fidelity to the way a character would think. Again on Chekhov, Wood notes that his “very narration disappears into that of one of his characters.” Persuasive storytelling is a virtue, and Wood references Aristotle’s On Poetics in arguing that in storytelling “a convincing impossibility” is always preferable to “an unconvincing possibility.”

One can see how these underlying principles might, to some, be jarring or even objectionable. His core values can be seen as being prescriptive, and therefore restrictive. “Most reviews simply present an opinion, and it's easy to dismiss contrary opinions—everyone has the right to an opinion, after all. But Wood raises the discussion to a higher level, which forces people to question and rethink their own understanding of literature,” said Kirsch of the Sun. Daniel Green, a critic who operates a literary blog called The Reading Experience, decried Wood’s “aesthetic conservatism” in an email interview. Wood, he argues, “implicitly heaps scorn on anyone who deviates from a supposed literary norm…and reinforces the idea that novelists should just keep doing what’s been done before.” In their first issue, the literary magazine n+1 called James Wood a talent but “an odd one, with a narrow, aesthetician’s interests and idiosyncratic tastes,” someone so fixed in his tastes as to seem to “want to be his own grandfather.” Another literary blogger and critic, Edward Champion, posited in an email interview that the best critics are those who adjust to “the ever-shifting nature of literature perception,” and that, by not doing so, a critic risks “literary parochialism.”

But James Wood’s principles and preferences are more nuanced and varied than they may seem, at first, to be. Thomas Meaney, the former literary editor of The New York Sun, suggested that “people who dislike James Wood dislike him because they think that his criticism is conservative in ways that are inhospitable to new works, i.e., it suffocates creativity with backward-looking essays that champion the 19th-century novel, novels revolving around the family, etc.” Such people, Meaney says, “are regrettably mistaken.” Many of Wood’s passions are made out of his exceptions. Wood favors Chekhov, who so often cedes stylistic control to his characters, but he also loves Bellow and Norman Rush, who are stylistically showy. Wood does not like essayistic writers who jump in to editorialize on the storytelling, but he admires D.H. Lawrence, who is ever jumping in. He writes about the value of the exploration of character, but has championed W.G. Sebald, who does not quite seem to have any round characters. Sam Munson, the online editor of Commentary Magazine, noted that “it is wrong to claim that Wood believes in a ‘right way,’ for novelists. This is a common charge laid at his feet. I think this is due to the fact that he appreciates—to a degree I have not seen in any other contemporary critic—what an earthquake the novel was for Western culture.” Wood has said that when he reads about himself in reviews he wishes sometimes to say, “‘Yes, but.’ Because just like any reader, my exceptions define me and that’s the only way to describe the novel.”

This may be why Wood favors a longer essay form for his reviews. He has written that a novel “'brings its own criteria for judgment with it,” and, at its best, his criticism is complex, considered, and accordingly wordier than the average book review. Wood is a close, a wonderfully close, reader. In an essay about Bellow in The Irresponsible Self, Wood quotes at length from Herzog. As Bellow wrote:

At the corner, he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire fed by the wreckage.

Then, Wood parses the passage for its genius. “Given so much [by Bellow],” Wood writes, “it might be easy for a reader to become blasé. Good writers tend to raise one up like canal blocks, so that one swims at their level and forgets the medium that supports one.” He catalogs the items in Bellow’s “exuberance of detail,” noticing that the demolition ball is “hard at work, yet ‘lazy’ and ‘browsing,’” and that furthermore the ball is “browsing on kitchens and parlors,” an odd yet apt choice of preposition, and so on, and so on. Wood pays homage to the revelatory nature of Bellow’s prose: “One realizes, with a shock, that Bellwow has taught one how to see and hear, has opened the senses.” At his best, Wood opens the eyes of his readers to the possibilities and the wonders of the writing he critiques; he teaches us how to better read.

Mark Sarvas, a novelist who runs the literary blog The Elegant Variation, said in an email interview that, above all, Wood has taught Sarvas to read more closely: “All too often, I read a Wood review of a book I've already read and I'm amazed at how differently, how much more deeply he reads. And invariably I pick the book up again and take another look.” Wood inspires one to read more, and more carefully. Wood has also espoused lesser-known authors, many of whom are international. In his blog, Sarvas has written about his “James Wood bookshelf,” which is made up of the books that Wood has praised that Sarvas has not yet read, but now wishes to; he is far from alone in this; admittedly, I have my own. Knut Hamsun, Bohumil Hrabal, Giavanni Verga, W.G. Sebald, J. F. Powers: all of these writers I have come to, gratefully, via Wood.

When Wood is harsh, his harshness, too, is footed firmly in the text. Criticizing John Updike’s Terrorist, Wood takes apart a clumsily constructed partial sentence:

Ahmad "is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by extraction, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the hot muddy fields of the overflowing Nile." (Ah, those Egyptians. This lofty genealogy is an extraordinary example of airy Orientalism, which, because the sentence combines baking and mud, clumsily manages to imply that the ancestors were somehow baked in mud. Egyptian bog people! Does Updike reread his own prose?)

Munson of Commentary says that Wood “makes no pretense of equivocation (a common pretense in contemporary criticism, along with a falsely cheerful ecumenism).” Perhaps this is partly why James Wood provokes such ire. Toni Morrison “loves her own language more than she loves her characters,” and she “cannot grant characters their own words.” The Don DeLillo of Underworld is a “didactic writer” who in every scene “uses his characters to force home his themes.” One can imagine that the many happy fans of these writers—not to mention the writers themselves—might have no use for the opinions of a critic so forceful in his condemnations.

An instance of a more productive dialogue between the critic and the novelist took place, famously, between James Wood and Zadie Smith. Wood wrote about both the shortcomings and successes of White Teeth, Smith’s first novel; Smith wrote back, expressing some agreement; by On Beauty, her third book, she seemed to have incorporated some of Wood’s criticism; Wood then said that the book seemed truly to “make good on her substantial talent.” This, it seems, is discourse at its best: when the critic acts as an improving voice, an artistic conscience; it may, however, be a scenario more quixotic than likely. Munson, of Commentary is not sanguine: “His effect, as nearly as I can tell, is incommensurate with his wisdom and ability: people continue writing self-indulgent, stupid books, and other people continue praising them. If he had any real effect, there would be less of this. I suppose that is too much to hope for.”

And then there are novelists who would like not to be influenced by Wood, or by any critic. Karan Mahajan, a 23-year-old writer whose debut novel, Family Planning, is coming out in the fall of 2008, says, “So far my fiction writing has only been influenced by other novels, and I hope I will always pit myself against the tradition of fiction, rather than that of criticism.” As a similarly young writer, I am more influenced, and more anxious. Why do I find myself agreeing with so much of what Wood says, and by agreeing, do I bend my prose to norms that are not necessarily meant for me? Ought I not try to make things new? And if I ought to be a revolutionary, can I, or am I already too influenced, too enamored, and what does all of this mean for my own fiction, not to mention my tyronic attempts at criticism? I am not entirely exaggerating if I say that there are nights when these questions keep me up.

Nearly everyone might agree, though, on the quality of Wood’s critical prose qua prose. In an essay about Edmund Wilson, Wood wrote that for criticism to last, it must, too, become literature. And how beautifully Wood writes; how well he makes literature of criticism. Wood is an important example, says Kirsch, not only for “his seriousness and his ambition,” but also for “using language in a literary way while writing about literature.” Writing about Virginia Woolf, Wood says that “her essays and reviews are a writer’s criticism, written in the language of art, which is the language of metaphor.” One could say the same of Wood. Even a cursory survey of his criticism yields writerly treasures. Gustave Flaubert, who “licensed the idea that writing does not comment on itself,” wrote fiction that “presents and withdraws, like a good footman.” Nikolai Gogol created “thousand-eyed sentences,” and Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse is a “needy monolith surrounded by the poor pebbles of his battered family.” In an essay about Herman Melville, Wood wrote that “when it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires” and “to be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own—that is the greatest desire of any writer.” In his critical writing, Wood delights in metaphor, in the unexpected phrase, and we are the richer for it.

In a world in which it seems that every year there are fewer and fewer readers, perhaps any serious dialogue about what makes good literature good and bad literature bad is, after all, good. In an interview, Pulitzer-prize winning novelist of The Hours (and director of the program where I am pursuing an MFA in fiction) Michael Cunningham said that “in the scattershot climate of contemporary literary criticism,” he is thankful for “an actual literary critic.” Though writers and readers “never agree unilaterally with any critic,” he, for one, prefers to write “in a world that's at least minimally equipped to distinguish shit from shinola.” Anxious or no, whether overly or rightly influenced, I have learned much about literature, and about reading and writing, from Wood’s criticism. And for that I am grateful.

Photographs courtesy of Reese Kwon

Reese Kwon has written for Narrative Magazine, Commentary and The New York Sun, and has received a fiction award from The Atlantic Monthly. She currently is a candidate for an MFA in Michael Cunningham's program at Brooklyn College, where she won a Himan-Brown award for creative writing. She graduated with a BA from Yale University in 2005; at Yale, she was awarded the Wallace Prize in fiction.