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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He comes out of the Gloriana, goes and gets a newspaper from the cigar store and a Coca-Cola.
And then hesitantly stands on Broadway about to go in to have breakfast with his father, but actually for about 20 pages thinking about his life going back to childhood and the mess he's made of things.
As I said a minute ago, it's a great book for purposes of our series, because although it's written in 1956, in some ways, if we go back to that term that I used at the very beginning of the series, the grammar of realism.
In some ways, the grammar of realism really hasn't changed since 1856, since Flaubert.
You could put passages from Bellow's novel and passages from Madame Bovary together, and you would say, despite modernism sort of sitting chronologically between 1856 and 1956, that's to say in the 1920s and 1930s, Bellow's novel reads like a good student of Flaubert's.
As with Flaubert, there's a tremendous control of precise, cinematic, very rich detail.
When Tommy comes into the breakfast room where his father is sitting, we get this description, for instance, of the view from the window where Dr. Adler is sitting.
Here's the passage.
Dr. Adler liked to sit in a corner that looked across Broadway, down to the Hudson and New Jersey.
On the other side of the street was a supermodern cafeteria with gold and purple mosaic columns.
On the second floor, a private eye school, a dental laboratory, a reducing parlor, a veterans club, and a Hebrew school shared the space.
The old man was sprinkling sugar on his strawberries.
Dr. Adler liked to sit in a corner
Small hoops of brilliance were cast by the water-glasses on the white tablecloth, despite a faint murkiness in the sunshine.
It was early summer, and the long window was turned inward.
A moth was on the pane, the putty was broken, and the white enamel on the frames was streaming with wrinkles.
So we notice that cinematic move that actually Flaubert sort of pioneered if we think of Charles Bovary arriving at the Rouault farm where he first meets Emma.
The camera goes into the breakfast room with Tommy.
sees Dr. Adler in the corner, looks out of the window, and then we get a marvelous collage, essentially, of apparently accidental details, apparently just glimpsed by the lens.
On the second floor, this is from the window, you could see a privatized school, a dental laboratory, a reducing parlor, a veterans club, and a Hebrew school sharing the space.
Showing 361–380 of 815 · page 19 of 41
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