June 14, 2021 Issue

A James Wood review has a distinctive look. Instead of the narrative approach that most literary critics opt for – paragraph on paragraph of plot summary and interpretation trailing down the page – Wood quotes and analyzes the writing. Mark O’Connell, in his review of Wood’s The Fun Stuff, says, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). This is an excellent description of Wood’s method. You see it in his “Where I’m Coming From,” a review of Francisco Goldman’s novel Monkey Boy, in this week’s issue. Midway in the piece, up goes the block quote:

An extended recollection from this period of Frankie’s life demonstrates the hospitable rhythms of the prose:

The memory of sitting in my bedroom’s window seat and passing my toy truck out through the bars to an Indian woman who took her baby boy out of her rebozo and set him down on the patterned old paving stones of the sidewalk so that he could play with the truck and my astonishment that he was naked. A memory like the broken-off half of a mysterious amulet that can only be made whole if that now-grown little boy remembers it, too, and we can somehow meet and put our pieces together. I don’t even remember if I let him keep the truck or not, though I like to think I did. Not all that likely that he’s even still alive, considering what the war years were like for young Maya men of our generation. Who knows, maybe he’s up here somewhere and even has children who were born here.

The density of the memory, the playing over present and past, the essayistic space made for an ongoing political dimension, along with an insistent optimism—all these are characteristic of the novel as a whole, and of Goldman’s feel for a kind of narrative phrasing that allows an ideally sauntering and shifting perspective.

This is quintessential Wood, and I love it. His artful use of quotation gives the reader a taste of the book under review. And, at the same time, it gives Wood an opportunity to do what he does best – analyze style.