RECENT ARRIVALS

The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 312 pages, $36For many, James Wood is the gold standard for contemporary literary critics. His lengthy book reviews, many of them written for The New Republic and the London Review of Books, are notable for the aesthetic, moral and narrative demands he makes on fiction. The unifying theme of this new collection of 23 essays (to call them reviews is to diminish their seriousness of purpose and achievement) is a defence of the expansiveness and compassion of what he calls the "secular comedy" of modern fiction. Among the comic writers discussed in often scintillatingly brilliant detail are Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and V. S. Naipaul. Authors getting corrective readings include Jonathan Franzen and J. M. Coetzee. Wood may be one of those very rare critics whose work is still read a half century on.