THE POWER OF ADJECTIVE AND ADVERB
JAMES WOOD
James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He was the chief literary critic
at the Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His
critical essays have been collected in two volumes, “The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief” (1999)
and “The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel” (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a novel, “The Book Against God” (2003), and a study of technique
in the novel, “How Fiction Works” (2008). He lives in Boston, and teaches half time at Harvard University, where
he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism.
I was excited, this year, to read the work of Elena Ferrante. This reclusive Italian novelist is a savage talent.
BY JAMES WOOD
DEC 09, 2013
REFLECTIONS
WHY?
Death gives birth to the first question, “Why?,” and seems to kill all the answers. Why do people die? Since people
die, why do they live? The novel throws us into the wide, skeptical, terrifying freedom of the “Why?” That
question is powerfully mobilized by novelistic form: not just because the novel is so good at evoking the ordinary
instances of a life but because it is so good at asserting the finished, completed form of a life.
BY JAMES WOOD
OCT 21, 2013
BOOKS
THE NEW CURIOSITY SHOP
Like the rest of us, Donna Tartt ages; but her fiction is going the other way. Her new novel, “The Goldfinch”
(Little, Brown), is a virtual baby: it clutches and releases the most fantastical toys. Its tone, language, and story
belong to children’s literature.
BY JAMES WOOD
BLOG: PAGE-TURNER
ALICE MUNRO, OUR CHEKHOV
The announcement that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes
many readers and writers as deliriously incredible.
BY JAMES WOOD
SEP 02, 2013
BOOKS
EASTERN PROMISES
“Necessary Errors” is a very good novel, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects
of one’s own youth. Necessary errors, indeed.
BY JAMES WOOD
AUG 05, 2013
BOOKS
ALL MY SONS
Virginia Woolf once said that great novelists write not in sentences but in pages. Novelistic form is, in some ways,
the achievement of this deep, patient rhythm. Much contemporary fiction, like much contemporary life, has a
restless flamboyance that preempts such wise shapeliness. In this regard, David Gilbert’s “& Sons” seems a
contemporary novelistic document, in which cleverness too often substitutes for feeling. It is frustrating to see a
writer of Gilbert’s talent weaken the novel’s narrative pressure, as he greedily pursues his stylish bon mots.
BY JAMES WOOD
JUL 22, 2013
A CRITIC AT LARGE
SINS OF THE FATHER
Can a man or a woman fulfill a sacred devotion to thought, or music, or art, or literature, while fulfilling a proper
devotion to spouse or children? The novel may be the family’s ideal almanac, but only a handful of the great
novelists of either gender had a successful family life.
BY JAMES WOOD
APRIL 19, 2013
BLOG: NEWS DESK
“HE KEPT TO HIMSELF”
For the next couple of hours, the frantic wail of police sirens was all you could hear. And it is the same today in
Cambridge. Watertown, where the manhunt apparently continues, is about a mile from our house.
BY JAMES WOOD
APR 08, 2013
BOOKS
YOUTH IN REVOLT
Rachel Kushner’s second novel, “The Flamethrowers,” is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples
with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is
never not telling a story.
BY JAMES WOOD
MAR 11, 2013
BOOKS
BROKEN VOWS
The best stories are passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable for their brave dualism.
Quatro’s female protagonists yearn and lust, and the stories articulate that lustful yearning with an exciting
literary freedom; but these infidelities play out against the shadow of Christian belief and Christian prohibition.
BY JAMES WOOD
PERSONAL HISTORY
BECOMING THEM
PERSONAL HISTORY about coming to resemble one’s parents, even as one’s parents age and change. Author
writes about his father’s habits, interests, and mannerisms, and notices how, over time, he has adopted them. He
has spent his thirties and forties journeying through a long realization that he is decisively his…
BY JAMES WOOD
JAN 21, 2013
BOOKS
WOMEN ON THE VERGE
BOOKS about the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. Elena Ferrante, or “Elena Ferrante,” is one of Italy’s best-known
least-known contemporary writers. She is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels, the most
celebrated of which is “The Days of Abandonment,” published in Italy in 2002. It’s assumed…
BY JAMES WOOD
DECEMBER 18, 2012
BLOG: PAGE-TURNER
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
An end-of-year bouquet like this one offers a chance to pick some flowers I didn’t get to this year.
BY JAMES WOOD
DEC 10, 2012
A CRITIC AT LARGE
LATE AND SOON
A CRITIC AT LARGE about the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson, especially “I Curse the River of Time.” Arvid
Jansen, the novel’s protagonist, is a familiar Petterson character, and “I Curse the River of Time” could be the title
of several of Petterson’s novels. Arvid’s life is drifting between banal failure…
BY JAMES WOOD
OCTOBER 26, 2012
BLOG: PAGE-TURNER
MOURDOCK’S DILEMMA
Cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at
least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.
BY JAMES WOOD
OCT 22, 2012
A CRITIC AT LARGE
GOD TALK
A CRITIC AT LARGE about the Book of Common Prayer, the first compendium of worship in English, written
largely by Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1549. Cranmer took as his main source the Sarum
Missal, but he did more than translate the Latin into English. Instead, he changed…
BY JAMES WOOD
OCT 15, 2012
BOOKS
MUSCLE-BOUND
BOOKS review of Tom Wolfe’s novel “Back to Blood” (Little, Brown), which explores racial and ethnic tensions
in the city of Miami. The novel follows Nestor Camacho, a Cuban-American policeman, after he arrests an
anti-Castro protestor and creates a racial “incident.” The novel is unfortunately shaped by Wolfe’s…
BY JAMES WOOD
AUG 13, 2012
BOOKS
TOTAL RECALL
BOOKS review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” A fair amount of contemporary prose seems to have
been written by people who, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, refuse to accept that they will die. Are there serious
contemporary writers who remind us of our mortality? The forty-three-year-old Norwegian…
BY JAMES WOOD
JUN 25, 2012
BOOKS
TRUE LIVES
BOOKS review of Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” (Henry Holt). Heti is a thirty-five-year-old Canadian
writer, who lives in Toronto. Her first book, “The Middle Stories,” published when she was twenty-four, was a
collection of brief postmodern fables. Her first novel, “Ticknor” (2005), was…
BY JAMES WOOD
JUNE 6, 2012
BLOG: NEWS DESK
BONFIRE OF THE MONARCHY
Last week, I was in Britain, for family reasons, and found myself in a country drunk on the mild ale of postwar
British patriotism: a gentle but irritating intoxication, in which everyone’s pride is...
BY JAMES WOOD