Profile …

… Critic turned author James Wood: ‘Sometimes I think I’ve lost my nerve. I’m not slaying people anymore’ | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The 52-year-old, who lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Claire Messud, and their two teenage children, describes himself as naturally “buoyant”, a disposition in evidence at a cafe in New York. Wood is in the city to teach a masterclass at Columbia University, a duty he combines with being a book critic at the New Yorker and professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard. It is a life of satisfying intellectual endeavour and no small public acclaim, but even as a boy, says Wood – the son of two teachers who struggled, in an act of what he has called “financial insanity”, to send Wood to Eton – he displayed an essential cheerfulness that others in his family decisively lacked; it’s a concern of Upstate, his second novel and seventh book, to consider where the roots of these variants lie.