The war for the soul of literature

By now, it's become commonplace to state that Wood, who was raised as an evangelical Anglican, has replaced his lost faith with his belief in literature. For an apostate, he is one God-haunted guy; religion is still the stick by which Wood measures all of human experience, which may be one reason why jokes make him nervous. He calls satire the "comedy of correction" because it judges its characters by the unyielding standards of a deity, specifically the scornfully laughing Yahweh of the Old Testament.

Although Wood doesn't go so far as to draw the obvious parallel, note that the compassionate "comedy of forgiveness" requires that the writer surrender his status as lofty creator and enter his characters, his creations, to the degree that his words, thoughts and being effectively merge with theirs. He becomes them. Remind you of anyone? Yet for all the New Testament overtones of this model, Wood labels it "secular comedy." Satire, he writes, is "religious comedy," because it doles out "punishment for those who deserve it" as opposed to "secular comedy," which offers "forgiveness to those who don't." In Wood's secular comedy, characters are "free to contradict themselves without being corrected by the author, are free to make mistakes without fearing authorial judgment."

There's nothing especially secular about any of this, if by secularism you mean something more positive and humanist than the mere absence of religion. Are these characters truly free, or are they merely unsupervised? The signal quality of Wood's comedy of forgiveness isn't liberation but relief -- at the departure of a prosecutorial God/author whose chill shadow still makes Wood shiver.

Though not technically religious, Wood thinks about literature religiously, and this, as much as his obvious intelligence and erudition, endears him to literary people, particularly authors, even when they disagree with him. It's not hard to see why. If literature is a religion, then what does that make novelists? For the chosen few, something akin to gods. Of course, hardly any contemporary writers are permitted to enter Wood's kingdom of heaven (only Monica Ali, in this collection), but many would rather see themselves as taking a long shot at divinity than as laboring in a quaint niche at the margins of a pop-mad society.

Wood is very, very serious, which makes literary people feel important, but also makes the topic of this book an odd choice. He's not known for his sense of humor, to put it mildly. Some of the funniest bits in "The Irresponsible Self" are inadvertent, such as Wood's attempt to encompass within his definition of "comedy" a novel described by another critic as "certainly the gloomiest in all Russian literature." He is always interesting, but rarely convincing. No one can beat him at making literature seem a matter of moral consequence, but he's not actually very good at making you want to read the books he loves.

Wood's taste is so monkishly circumscribed, so painfully attuned to the most delicate of registers, that he winds up depicting the reading of new fiction as a strenuous effort to soldier through a few books without having your sensibility brutalized. Editorially, this is a bit like sending an agoraphobe off to write about adventure travel. The hysterical realist novel, Wood insists, is a noisy "perpetual-motion machine" engaged in "the pursuit of vitality at all costs." Its authors produce "books of great self-consciousness with no selves in them; curiously arrested books which know a thousand different things -- How to make the best Indonesian fish curry! The sonics of the trombone! The drug market of Detroit! The history of strip cartoons! -- but do not know a single human being."

Without a doubt, some contemporary novels are overly frenetic and data-stuffed. But Wood doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between the frankly bad specimens (Salman Rushdie's "Fury," a book that, contrary to Wood's predictions, was widely panned) and those that enjoyably gratify readers' curiosity about things like the drug trade in Detroit (why not?). They all strike him as inhuman because he has no interest in their struggle to describe what it feels like to live in a jittery world where authenticity has disappeared in a maze of electronic screens, and people often feel that the freedom to choose between multiple identities leaves them unsure whether any of those identities can be real. Wood is a great champion of the real in fiction, and particularly of characters who believe so entirely in their own reality that they convince the reader of it too. But how, then, do you write about a world where so many real people feel unreal?

Next Page: Dale Peck's emotional tone suggests the diary of a bright but angry 14-year-old girl

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