James Wood

James Wood studied at Eton College, Jesus College and Chorister School. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with Harvard University, The Guardian and The New Republic. Positions recorded include Booker Prize judge. Works named in the authority record are The book against God (novel). Distinctions recorded are Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Berlin Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — James Wood • Born — 1 November 1965 • Birthplace — Durham, County Durham, England • Occupation — Literary critic • Education — Jesus College, Cambridge • Children — 2 • Awards — Young Journalist of the Year Berlin Prize Fellowship • Employer — Harvard University The New Yorker

James Wood was born in Durham, England, to Dennis William Wood (born 1928), a Dagenham-born minister and professor of zoology at Durham University, and Sheila Graham Wood, née Lillia, a schoolteacher from Scotland. Wood was raised in Durham in an evangelical wing of the Church of England, an environment he describes as austere and serious. He was educated at Durham Chorister School (on a music scholarship) and at Eton College (with the support of a bursary based on his parents' "demonstrated financial need"; his older brother attended Eton as a King's Scholar). He read English Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1988 he graduated with a First.

After Cambridge, Wood "holed up in London in a vile house in Herne Hill and started trying to make it as a reviewer". He began his career by reviewing books for The Guardian. In 1990, he won Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. From 1991 to 1995, Wood was the chief literary critic of The Guardian, and in 1994 he served as a judge for the Booker Prize for fiction. In 1995, he became a senior editor at The New Republic in the United States. In 2007 Wood left his role at The New Republic to become a staff writer at The New Yorker. Wood's reviews and essays have appeared frequently in The New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books where he is a member of its editorial board. He and his wife, the novelist Claire Messud, are on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.

Like the critic Harold Bloom, Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than the more ideologically driven trends that are popular in contemporary academic literary criticism. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting... to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that". The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments". Wood coined the term 'hysterical realism', which he used to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs". 'Hysterical realism' describes novels that are characterised by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story. In response to an essay Wood wrote on the subject, author Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a: Wood coined the term commercial realism, which he identifies with the author Graham Greene, and, in particular, with his book The Heart of the Matter. He clarified it as attention to the minutiae of daily life, taking in mind elements of the everyday that are important owing to their supposed lack of importance. He believes it to be an effective style of writing because it captures reality by depicting banal features as well as interesting ones. Wood emphasises throughout the book How Fiction Works (particularly in the final chapter) that the most important literary style is realism. He states: When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries. Wood additionally attests to the significance of Flaubert in developing the form of the novel:

In 1992, Wood married Claire Messud, an American novelist. They reside in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have a daughter, Livia, and a son, Lucian.

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