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
So you notice just in the passage I read out a very easy move between the sort of classic free and direct style or close third person, where it was indeed in third person, to in the last two or three sentences.
A move towards first person.
There, I think, if we look back at Flaubert, we see a marked advance.
There's a little bit of that kind of what we would call early stream of consciousness in Flaubert, but he actually doesn't do very much of it.
For Bellow, who has, of course, read his modernist texts and absorbed them and, as it were, come out the other side in the 1950s and absorbed modernism, there's an easy way with essentially stream of consciousness.
In that sense, this classically realist book actually has a sort of slightly avant-garde beginning, which is to say, no 19th century novelist, I think, maybe with the exception of crazy Knut Hamsun in his wonderful novel,
But no 19th century novelist would begin a short novel with essentially 20 pages of someone standing on a street thinking.
But that's what Bellow in a sort of mildly Joyce-ian way does with this book before Tommy goes into the breakfast room to confront his father.
And finally, if we're doing our sort of realist anthology of techniques, you'd have to say that this is a book, we were talking about this in relation to Mrs. Dalloway and its sort of Dickensian flat characters.
Bellow is very Dickensian and very Tolstoyan in his love of leitmotif.
So he likes to repeat things about characters.
Tamkin will be, in various ways, we're told about Tamkin's trickster-like, devil-like character.
mannerisms.
Tommy, we're often told that he has a panting laugh.
This panting laugh is really an important way of fixing Tommy's desperation for us.
He wants to fit in, he wants to be liked, but he's always not quite doing it properly.
He's always, as it were, out of breath.
So this panting laugh is very important, as is
Tommy's broad, strong, but already weirdly bowed and humped back for a 44-year-old.
There's something not quite right about the way the weight of the world rests Atlas-like or Job-like on Tommy's shoulders.
Showing 421–440 of 815 · page 22 of 41
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