December 12, 2016, Issue

James Wood, in his “Reality Effects” (The New Yorker, December 19 & 20, 2011), writes, “The contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.” Yet Wood, an excellent essayist himself (see, for example, his terrific “The Fun Stuff,” The New Yorker, November 29, 2010), seldom writes criticism about essays. “Scrutiny,” in this week’s issue, is one of his rare essay collection reviews. The only other one that comes to mind is the aforesaid “Reality Effects,” a consideration of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead.

“Scrutiny” is a review of Helen Garner’s essay/journalism miscellany Everywhere I Look. Wood says that Garner is “superbly alive to the narrative dynamics” of her subject, whether it’s murder, sexual assault, or a memoir of her mother. He says of Garner’s The House of Grief, a nonfiction account of two murder trials of a man charged with killing his three small children,

Again, as in The First Stone, what consumes her are the difficult questions that seem to lie beyond the reach of formal narration: the deepest assumptions of class and gender and power; the problem of how well we ever understand someone else’s motives.

Garner’s narrative art, as described by Wood, reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s work, e.g., her great “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010. Jacqueline Rose’s masterly “Bantu in the Bathroom” (London Review of Books, November 19, 2015) may also be comparable.

As usual with any James Wood review, “Scrutiny” contains several inspired descriptions of style (e.g., “brought alive by her mortal details,” “in the tense torque of its self-argument”; “walks us along an engrossing and plausible narrative fuse”). But what thrills me is that these are descriptions of factual style, even though Wood, a champion of “the fictionality of fiction” (“Reality Effects”), can’t quite bring himself to use the word “factual.” Here is the best literary critic in the world treating an artful work of fact as seriously as he does an artful work of fiction. I love it! I hope he does more of it.