James Douglas Graham Wood (born 1 November 1965)[1] is an English[a] literary critic, essayist and novelist.
[3][1] Wood was raised in Durham in an evangelical wing of the Church of England, an environment he describes as austere and serious.
[1] After Cambridge, Wood "holed up in London in a vile house in Herne Hill and started trying to make it as a reviewer".
He and his wife, the novelist Claire Messud, are on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.
[7] Wood began teaching literature in a class he co-taught with the late novelist Saul Bellow at Boston University.
[9] Wood coined the term hysterical realism, which he uses 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: painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth... [yet] any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna.
You cannot place first-time novelists with literary giants, New York hipsters with Kilburn losers, and some of the writers who got caught up with me are undeserving of the criticism.
[10]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.
Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.
In the company of other critics who wrote with such seriousness, at such length, in such old-fashioned terms, he would have been less burdened with the essentially parodic character of his enterprise.
[18]In response, the n+1 editors devoted a large portion of the journal's subsequent issue to a roundtable on the state of contemporary literature and criticism.
He also has—and I haven't ever read him on me—but I'm told he wrote a vicious review of me in The New Republic, which I never look at anyway, in which he clearly evidenced, as one of my old friends put it, a certain anxiety of influence.
I wanted to say something similar, less wittily, to the immigration officer: precisely because I don't need to become an American citizen, to take citizenship would seem flippant; leave its benefits for those who need a new land.