The war for the soul of literature

You could say that the latest books by Wood ("The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel") and Peck ("Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction"), each a collection of essays and reviews, pick their fiercest quarrels with other critics. If critics didn't fuss over what Wood dismisses as the "perpetual excitements and digressions" of hysterical realism, if they did not gullibly cheerlead for "bombastic and befuddled writers," as Peck would have it, the need for both Wood and Peck to take those authors down a peg (or two, or, in Peck's case, more like 10 or 20) would evaporate. Both critics are on crusades, if only Peck quite sees himself in that light. Their enemies are not so much the perpetrators of vile maximalist novels as those who publish and praise them, who put them on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and profile their authors in glossy magazines. And then there's the ignorant and vulgar public, which insists on buying and reading the stuff.

Wood's is by far the more developed and articulated critical project; Peck is all dodges and feints when it comes to putting his aesthetic on the line. Wood knows what he likes, the kind of literature he can believe in, and also knows that it will never attract a large readership. In disdainfully surveying Jonathan Franzen's essay about the difficulty of writing a novel that "engages with the culture," Wood explains that such a book shouldn't even be attempted because it could never be any good: "The only success is aesthetic, and the 'culture' will never validate aesthetic success, will never 'engage' with that." The true artist holds himself apart from the mere noise of the popular. What Franzen and his mentor DeLillo propose, Wood maintains, is that authors "flatter the culture the novel is supposed to resist."

For Wood, the ideal author appears to be Anton Chekhov (a curious choice for a writer so prone to expounding on the novel, since Chekhov mostly wrote short stories and plays). In the best fiction, Wood argues, the author submerges himself utterly in his characters, so that no image or idea surfaces in the text that would not occur naturally to them. The goal is to achieve a style of transparent "innocence," purified of the author's voice, thoughts and sophistication. The only proper subject for such a book is family relations, or perhaps the relations in a small, immediate community. Most of the authors Wood holds up as exemplars -- Isaac Babel, Italo Svevo and Giovanni Verga, for instance -- wrote in or before the first half of the 20th century and about people who lived before the onset of mass media. (It's easier to resist a culture that hasn't happened yet.)

In "The Irresponsible Self," a collection of previously published pieces all circling around a central argument, Wood aims to explain how this best kind of fiction, when it concerns itself with "the mild tragicomedy" that "arises naturally out of context and situation," is superior to satire and other "novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic." The works Wood labels "hysterical realism" belong to the latter camp; they try too hard. The tragicomic is gentle and sympathetic; it forgives its characters for follies and inconsistencies that are simply part of an inevitable human waywardness and unknowability. The harsh comedy of satire, on the other hand, presumes to reduce people to predictable types or caricatures (the miser, the hypocrite, etc.) and then "scourge" them for their shortcomings.

This is a fine but familiar distinction; satirists are forever being accused of cruelty and condescension, sometimes with excellent cause. Wood probably draws the line more closely than most of us, though, relegating a huge chunk of comedy into the realm of the Just Too Much. Humor, for him, is a remarkably fraught enterprise. Making a social comparison, he writes of "those forced moments when someone says 'Do you want to hear a joke?' -- at which point most of us freeze, alarmed that we won't get the punch line, and nervously aware that we are now inhabiting a 'comic moment.'" Actually, most of us probably think something more like, "Ah, a joke. I hope it's funny," and stand prepared to groan good-naturedly at the teller if it's not. That could be just the brash American in me talking, but I've watched enough BBC America to suspect that in this department Wood is morbidly sensitive even for an Englishman. Why?

Next Page: Though he's no longer religious, Wood thinks about literature religiously -- and this endears him to literary people

• View blog reactions