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A review by bittersweet_symphony
The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood
4.0
James Wood is charming, weaving sentimental antidotes from his own life with quotations and allusions to the many literary works which have impacted him. Waxing nostalgic, and introspective on how life matters to us, Wood is in his prime. He echoes the voice of a sharp literary critic who has softened with age.
The Nearest Thing to Life is a collection of 4 short essays derived from lectures given in the past few years. In 'Why' he visits the overlapping themes between religion and literature. The novel serves as a new home for the "secular homeless", those for whom religion has failed to enrich their lives, fallen short of answering the mystery of existence. One of his greatest gifts from 'Why' reveals the power of the novel. "We are just getting through the instances--eating breakfast, going to work, earning a living, making sure the children get to school, and so on even when the instances are joyous, time goes slack and we are not able to see, in our great relaxation, the shape of our moments, their beginnings and ends, their phrases and periods..At the service, I was struck by the thought that death gives us the awful privilege of seeing a life whole...There is this strangeness of a life story having no shape--or more accurately, nothing but is present--until it has its ending; and then suddenly the whole trajectory is visible."
In 'Serious Noticing' he elaborates on what differentiates artists--writers in particular--from the rest of us. "In ordinary life, we don't spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography...civilians merely see, while artists look...a fairly good test of literary quality is if a sentence or image or phrase of a writer comes to your mind unbidden when you are, say, just walking down the street. But you might also be standing in front of a tree. And, if you should see a bird climbing the trunk of a tree, you will see indeed that it flinches its way up...Fiction is extraordinarily good at dramatizing how contradictory people are. How we can want two opposed things at once."
'Using Everything' is the weakest of his 4 essays. Wood recounts how his stumbling upon an encyclopedia of novel summaries became his initiation into the world of literary criticism. "These short descriptions seemed like passionate messages sent to me from inside the world of literature: they had an intoxicating air of urgent aesthetic advocacy, an apparent proximity to the creative source, a deep certainty that writing mattered, that great books were worth living and dying for, that consequently, bad or boring books needed to be identified and winnowed out. This, I felt, was how writers spoke about literature!" It conjured up for me my early memories of picking up Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams' from the library at age 12--to share with my friends at a sleepover. I have been a student of psychology ever since.
'Secular Homelessness' is an ideal way to end a generally contemplative series of essays. He muses on what it means to be an exile--or more accurately, what his homelessness in America (willfully separated from his English homeland) has meant. He links it to the nearly universal experience of leaving home and returning to a home that could never be the same, which shall always exist as an ideal which was never experienced. "Most of us leave home, at least once; there is the necessity to leave, the difficulty of returning, and then, in later life as one's parents being to falter, the necessity to return again...What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes life--is indeed how life is lived."
Sounding like a man who has found acceptance in his large choices that always seemed so small, I hope we can enjoy many more years of his literary commentary, his insights, and his pleas for us to "use everything", every tool we have to unpack the gift of literature to give our lives clarity.
The Nearest Thing to Life is a collection of 4 short essays derived from lectures given in the past few years. In 'Why' he visits the overlapping themes between religion and literature. The novel serves as a new home for the "secular homeless", those for whom religion has failed to enrich their lives, fallen short of answering the mystery of existence. One of his greatest gifts from 'Why' reveals the power of the novel. "We are just getting through the instances--eating breakfast, going to work, earning a living, making sure the children get to school, and so on even when the instances are joyous, time goes slack and we are not able to see, in our great relaxation, the shape of our moments, their beginnings and ends, their phrases and periods..At the service, I was struck by the thought that death gives us the awful privilege of seeing a life whole...There is this strangeness of a life story having no shape--or more accurately, nothing but is present--until it has its ending; and then suddenly the whole trajectory is visible."
In 'Serious Noticing' he elaborates on what differentiates artists--writers in particular--from the rest of us. "In ordinary life, we don't spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography...civilians merely see, while artists look...a fairly good test of literary quality is if a sentence or image or phrase of a writer comes to your mind unbidden when you are, say, just walking down the street. But you might also be standing in front of a tree. And, if you should see a bird climbing the trunk of a tree, you will see indeed that it flinches its way up...Fiction is extraordinarily good at dramatizing how contradictory people are. How we can want two opposed things at once."
'Using Everything' is the weakest of his 4 essays. Wood recounts how his stumbling upon an encyclopedia of novel summaries became his initiation into the world of literary criticism. "These short descriptions seemed like passionate messages sent to me from inside the world of literature: they had an intoxicating air of urgent aesthetic advocacy, an apparent proximity to the creative source, a deep certainty that writing mattered, that great books were worth living and dying for, that consequently, bad or boring books needed to be identified and winnowed out. This, I felt, was how writers spoke about literature!" It conjured up for me my early memories of picking up Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams' from the library at age 12--to share with my friends at a sleepover. I have been a student of psychology ever since.
'Secular Homelessness' is an ideal way to end a generally contemplative series of essays. He muses on what it means to be an exile--or more accurately, what his homelessness in America (willfully separated from his English homeland) has meant. He links it to the nearly universal experience of leaving home and returning to a home that could never be the same, which shall always exist as an ideal which was never experienced. "Most of us leave home, at least once; there is the necessity to leave, the difficulty of returning, and then, in later life as one's parents being to falter, the necessity to return again...What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth is the slow revelation that I made a large choice many years ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes life--is indeed how life is lived."
Sounding like a man who has found acceptance in his large choices that always seemed so small, I hope we can enjoy many more years of his literary commentary, his insights, and his pleas for us to "use everything", every tool we have to unpack the gift of literature to give our lives clarity.