Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997-2019 by James Wood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

By Allen Barra

“But is a story richer the second time it’s told?” asks Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail. Surely the answer is a resounding yes, a sentiment with which all great critics, notably James Wood, Edmund White, and Vivian Gornick, agree.

Wood, a staff writer at the New Yorker and professor of literary criticism at Harvard, has written several volumes of fiction and nonfiction, including How Fiction Works (2008), which dissolves the line between creative writing and creative reading. With the passing of Clive James, he might be called the most influential critic in the English-speaking world. Serious Noticing, a collection of his best pieces, is a feast for the intellectually horny.

Wood takes on the heavyweights with bold rereadings of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, and Melville, and reassessments of modern greats Bellow, Orwell, and V. Woolf. For good measure he makes shrewd appraisal of celebrated contemporaries Cormac McCarthy, Elena Ferrante, and Marilynne Robinson.

Wood seems to have read everything and reread most of that. He has even reread himself. In a remarkable chapter, “Serious Noticing,” he reflects on his own reflections of 20 years earlier on Chekhov’s great story “The Kiss.” The story hasn’t changed, but time and life have given him a wider and deeper perspective of it. This time he sees “The Kiss” as “a story about a story. … A story is story-producing. … Stories are [italics his] dynamic combinations of surplus and lack: disappointing because they must end, and disappointing because they cannot really end.” Simply, great stories leave you wanting more.

Wood’s best essays culminate in starbursts of illumination.

On V.S. Naipaul: “The public snob, the grand bastard … has a conservative vision but radical eyesight.”

On W.G. Sebald: His “quiet, bashful, mysteriously subaqueous prose brings alive the paradoxical combination of drift and paralysis” that afflicts his exiled characters.

In a much-deserved takedown of Paul Auster, Wood shows flashes of the savagery he was famous for years ago at The Guardian. Auster’s “pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager collectors to get the latest issue.” He is nastier in deflating “the big contemporary novel” of the kind written by, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith, which often veer away from magical realism into the realm of “hysterical realism … which borrows from the real while evading it.” (“Hysterical realism” should go into literary lexicon.)

Wood excels at synthesizing a writer’s oeuvre and offering fresh insights: Ibsen “is always tying the moral shoelaces of his characters, making everything neat, presentable, knowable.” “Melville founded American vernacular prose equally with Twain. … Melville Americanises Shakespeare, gives it tilt.” Italian novelist Elena Ferrante “turns ordinary domestic misery into an expressionistic hell; she can pull a scream out of thin air.” Marilynne Robinson “is voluble in defense of silence.”

Wood is weakest when in trying to make The Big Judgment, forcing too much out of a critique. Virginia Woolf’s The Collected Essays “is the most substantial body of criticism in English this century.” I’m a Woolf fan, too, but how is her criticism more substantial than Edmund Wilson’s, Lionel Trilling’s, or Harold Bloom’s?

When it comes to his favorite author, Dostoevsky, “even the very godless ones like Fyodor Karamazov, live under the mottled shadow of religious categories.” Wood jumps the track, I think, when he argues that “Stendhal … is a mere gardener in Dostoevsky’s underground, a genial above-grounder by comparison.” Stendhal is nobody’s gardener. Dostoevsky never created a character so full of elan vital as Julian Sorrel in The Red and the Black. And since his greatest novels were published decades before Dostoevsky’s, it was the Russian who spent time in the Frenchman’s garden.

More rapturous than even Wood’s praise for Dostoevsky is his love for the late drummer for The Who, Keith Moon. Raised on classical music, Wood had an epiphany on hearing Moon “because his many-armed, joyous, semaphoring lunacy suggested a man possessed by the antic spirit of drumming. He was pure, irresponsible, restless, childish.” Wood would have made a fine rock critic.

James Wood’s voice is that of your favorite English professor, the one who got you hooked on Woolf and Joyce and the Russians. Edmund White’s is that of your gay cousin who dazzles you with enthusiasm for everything he has read (and reread). “Reading,” White reflects in his preface to The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, “is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act” and “a hobby that never grows stale … an unpunished vice.” (He takes his title from a 1941 essay by French poet Valery Larbaud, This Unpunished Vice: Reading.)

White insists that “I give the illusion of being well read.” He skipped some of the classics and is unapologetic about having never read The Faerie Queene (which makes me feel better about not having read it myself). It’s a superb illusion, one that takes in Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen (whose novel The House in Paris “is way superior to Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster”), Gogol, Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata, Jean Rhys’ After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie, Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, Andre Gide (“the tutelary god of my adolescence”), Colette, and French novelists Pierre Guyotat and Jean Giono.

White grew up in the Midwest, the son of a father who disapproved of his reading and who believed “the cure for homosexuality is yard work.” His worst fear about being gay “was not that it would stigmatize me as a person but that it would limit me as a novelist.” It had the opposite effect, providing him with the unique perspective from which to cast a wry eye at the rest of the world.

Gayness didn’t limit White’s outlook, but it did, probably, limit his audience. Still, in his 30s he was able to conclude, “I may never be so well known as John Updike, but to my few readers I’m indispensable.” Few readers, perhaps, but discerning ones. After the publication of White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), Vladimir Nabokov sent him a note of praise and later, “in an unguarded moment … revealed I was his favorite American writer.” Repaying the compliment, he reveals, “my favorite book has always been Lolita,” which he has read several times. But “the greatest novel in all literature [is] Anna Karenina,” which he has read 10 times. He has only read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu five times, but that means all seven volumes.

White’s selections in The Unpunished Vice make you feel as if you’re dropping by booths at a literary world’s fair. He is passionate about the genius of Stendhal – a subject on which I would like to sit him down at a table with James Wood. He cherishes “Tolstoy’s uncanny empathy for diverse people and even animals, F. Scott’s lyricism, Colette’s worldly wisdom, James Merrill’s wit, Walt Whitman’s biblical if agnostic inclusiveness, and Annie Dillard’s sublime nature descriptions.” He admires Stephen Crane, whom he finds “curious and openhearted,” curious enough to have indicated in his journals that he intended a novel, Hotel de Dream, about a young male prostitute. Crane didn’t live long enough to write it, but, generously, White “decided to write it for him.” He acknowledges his debt to the “simplicity, formalism, ritual, and a muted eroticism” of such classic Japanese works such as The Tale of Genji.

When White was young, he read in such a rush that “it never would have occurred to me to reread a book.” But though books don’t change as we grow older, what we want from them does.

In the introduction to Unfinished Business, Vivian Gornick writes:

It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on an analyst’s couch. … It seems that I misremembered quite a lot about this or that character or this or that plot turn – they met here in New York, I was sure it was Rome; the time was 1870, I thought it was 1900; and the mother did what to the protagonist?

In acclaimed memoirs (Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City), Gornick has fearlessly reexamined her life and reevaluated her decisions; since books have been such a large part of that life – “I sometimes think I was born reading” – it’s natural that she should reappraise her favorite books.

Her “coming of age novel” was D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, which she first read at 20 and read for the fourth time “in shall we say my advanced maturity.” She discovered “that my memory of the overriding theme – sexual passion as the central experience of life – was wrong.” At the heart of the novel, she now finds, is the struggle “not between Paul and his mother but between Paul and the illusion of sexual love as liberation. It was this last it was taking me forever to understand.”

By the time Gornick reached her mid-20s, she and her schoolmates were “besotted with Colette. … Not another living writer, it seemed to us, understood our situation as well as Colette.” When she was young, “the entire world seemed to collect around what I took to be the narrator’s wisdom.” In advanced maturity, “that wisdom seemed narrow and confined.” Edmund White’s reaction to rereading Colette was similar: “[she] had a narrow genius but a very deep talent.” Rereading, however, has deepened Gornick’s admiration for Elizabeth Bowen, “whose power I felt when I was young, but whose value I did not grasp until I was old.”

“How often,” Gornick asks, “have lifelong friends or lovers shuddered to think, ‘If I had met you at another time …’ It’s the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness.” She is sad “thinking of all the good books I wasn’t in the mood to take in the first time I read them, and never went back to.” Fewer, I would guess, than if you hadn’t read critics you trust on the art of rereading.

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He was cited last year by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for literary and film criticism.