Last week I was lucky enough to be tipped off about a very ill-publicized Chicago talk given by James Wood, literary critic for the New Republic, London Review of Books, and more. Sadly, I got the word too late to read the book he was discussing, Saul Bellow’s 1956 novella Seize the Day. I’m a fan of Wood’s, but who isn’t? If there’s much of a dissenting camp on his excellence, it’s a quiet one. My tipster OFOB and I were genuinely excited.
Only about twenty-five people showed up, most of them armed with marked-up copies of the slim text. We listened to Wood deliver a talk that was an interpretation of the novella, an appreciation of Bellow, and a brief for the primacy of literary form, in ascending order of generality. Unlike some of us, Wood speaks exactly as fluently as he writes, but without any brittle veneer, by which I mean that his talking sounds like talking, not writing. Yet the man is a font of seamless quotations–words spilled from his mouth in tidy, dense aper