Publishing Company Blog | Literary critic James Wood: ‘I’m taking a religious view of an earthly form’

Literary critic James Wood: ‘I’m taking a religious view of an earthly form’

Written By Unknown on Sunday, April 5, 2015 | 3:18 AM

Wood’s new book tells how novels gave him the freedom to think when he was growing up. Has he become an evangelist for literature?

This, I thought when I arrived to meet James Wood, is no place for a literary critic to be staying – a boutique hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan that offers “karma rewards”, including “spa credits”, to frequent guests. In the lobby, the lift disgorged corporate fixers, high-styled hipsters, Japanese tourists festooned with electronic gadgets, and then the incongruous figure of Wood – slightly hunched, donnishly inward-looking despite his smile, a man who lives in books and who in The Nearest Thing to Life praises novels for a “hospitality” that is probably more welcoming than the hotel’s “luxurious Frette linens”, “in-room yoga mats” and “signature animal-print robes”.

We talked in a black den where an espresso machine hissed like an angry dragon in a corner. “It’s an experiment,” said Wood about the place where he’d spent the night away from his home in Boston. “Anyway, in America, I’m often the only literary critic in the hotel!” Wherever you find him, he is a rarity: not an abstract theorist or an analytical mechanic but a writer for whom criticism is a way of proselytising for literature and narrowing the gap between art and life.