James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Tommy Wilhelm, a sloppy, out-of-work, divorced 44-year-old, former salesman for the Rojax Corporation, has made a mess of things, has made a mess of his life, and is trying, I would say, for the first 40, 50 pages of the book, essentially just to get a blessing from his father.
His father is, in every important respect, the opposite of Tommy Wilhelm.
Dr. Adler, and I'll come to the name change in a minute, Dr. Adler, Tommy's father, is a distinguished retired physician, continent, discreet, orderly, self-disciplined, and severe.
Both of them live in an apartment hotel called the Gloriana, which is wonderfully evoked.
In fact, the whole Upper West Side of Manhattan, where this book is set, is wonderfully
evoked.
And on the day of this novel, Tommy is heading towards breakfast to talk to his father.
He needs things from his father.
First of all, he needs a kind of emotional support that his father can't give.
He also will need, so we discover, some help with the rent, which Tommy can't pay.
His
And Tommy needs sorting out because he's also got mixed up with a charlatan, trickster, shyster figure called Dr. Tamkin.
I'm using that word shyster with deliberation because I think the novel, as I'll explain later, is very much to do with questions and varieties, problems, varieties of Jewishness.
So he's got mixed up with a sort of false prophet called Dr. Tamkin, who also lives in the Gloriana.
Tamkin is a psychologist and sort of amateur business speculator and has persuaded Tommy to lend him $1,000 in order to speculate on the commodities market, specifically in lard and rye.
And as the day proceeds, so we will gather that things are not going well on the commodities market.
Tommy's going to lose out.
But that's essentially the shape of the novel.
And it begins its first 20, 30 pages rather wonderfully.
It's just Tommy hesitating to go into.
Showing 341–360 of 815 · page 18 of 41
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