“What is the meaning and design of my life?” asks the central character of James Wood’s new novel. Throughout Wood’s work, there’s a conversation about the triangular relationship between fiction, religion and “the real”. In The Nearest Thing to Life (2015), he describes religion’s central question as “the why question”: “Why do people die? The great novel, for Wood, will reveal its greatness both in convincingly representing life and in probing the reality of that life. In Upstate, by contrast, Wood has wisely sidelined religion, addressing the why question purely through philosophy.

Source: The Guardian March 22, 2018 09:00 UTC