One of the most thrilling things as a serious reader is to come across a work, fiction or nonfiction, that feels kindred to yourself. It is as if you could have written the book, or at least a flimsy facsimile. James Wood’s The Nearest Thing to Life is such a book for me. He writes of the kinds of things I think about daily: religion and fiction and the “why?” questions of life. I feel validated when I come across such a work, it makes me I am reading as spiritual practice. He says he came form a religious and intellectual family; I came from neither, so I don’t have many immediate connections to this world. But I relate when he says he remembers being a young person discovering books and stories as “an utterly free space,” where anything can happen and you can meet up with all sorts of people you never would in your daily life. Anything can be thought, believed, written.
In reading I developed the belief that the people who notice the most are the smartest and most envied. Wood has a chapter on this topic: “Serious Noticing.” For me cultivating this habit of noticing became noticing for pleasure.
This book reminded me of why I decided to go to graduate school in literature, and reminded me that such a passion for fiction is something to treasure. In the book I found perhaps the best statement that sums up why I decided to abandon a career in academics: “A lot of the criticism I most admire is not especially analytical but is really a kind of passionate redescription.” I learned I was not interested in literary theory or taking things apart for structure. I quickly grew tired of trying to show how clever I was by finding faults with great works of fiction. People who truly love reading fiction live their lives through their books, analyze the structure of their lives the way they do books, and decide if a work is good or not by the way it makes them feel, by the way it relates/challenges/expands to the reader’s own view of the world. This book is a great pleasure to read for such a person.
This tension, between secular instance and religious form, is acute in fiction as it is not in religious narrative; it is perhaps the novel’s claim to power: it’s the reason the novel throws us so often into the wide, skeptical, terrifying freedom of the ‘Why?’
Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2015. Print. 978-1-61168-742-2