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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Close Readings · Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

This is someone who's absolutely conformed with himself.

So we have this amazing control of detail.

I'm going to come back to details in a

So a Flaubertian amplitude of detail, cinematic zooming and roving around.

Our old friend free indirect style.

Bellow is a master at it.

In those first 20 or so pages, as I said, Tommy is standing on Broadway and we're getting pictures of the world, but we're also seamlessly and easily going back into Tommy's

mind you'll also notice if you look at those passages again that bellow does something that you would think more writers would do but he does it and they don't actually they tend not to but bellow does it very easily that's to say he moves between third and first person when he's doing free and direct style very very easily this is tommy on broadway thinking about how he's let down his father

But the doctor had no answer.

He only nodded.

So this is Tommy thinking about his father.

You might have told him that Seattle was near Puget Sound or that the Giants and Dodgers were playing a night game.

So little was he moved from his expression of healthy, handsome, good-humoured old age.'

he behaved toward his son as he had formerly done toward his patients and it was a great grief to wilhelm it was almost too much to bear couldn't he see couldn't he feel had he lost his family sense greatly hurt wilhelm struggled however to be fair old people are bound to change he said

"'They have hard things to think about.

"'They must prepare for where they're going.

"'They can't live by the old schedule any longer, "'and all their perspectives change, "'and other people become alike, kin and acquaintances.

"'Dad is no longer the same person,' Wilhelm reflected.

"'He was thirty-two when I was born, and now he's going on eighty.'

Furthermore, it's time I stopped feeling like a kid toward him, a small son.

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