In fact, one of the many ironies that flock around Wood is that it would probably take Wood himself-a world-class praiser who is rarely wrong about authors he loves-to adequately catalogue the many pleasures of reading James Wood. (After writing for The New Republic for twelve years, he moved last summer to The New Yorker.) His strengths leave very little room to dispute this supremacy. He’s been, by now, pretty much universally acknowledged-grudgingly, fawningly, eagerly, nervously, warningly, or mockingly, depending on which journals you subscribe to-as the best book critic currently classing up the back end of America’s magazines. Over the past two decades, James Wood has established himself as one of the strangest, most vivid critical characters on the scene.

You might say, in fact-if you’re in an old-fashioned, paradoxical mood-that critics are the very apotheosis of literary character, since they are characters formed entirely out of characterizations of other characters.

Literary critics are, above all, literary characters: verbal constructs that posture as human beings in order to sell some more or less persuasive story.

How fiction works wood