... and I am excited to see what his move from TNR to the New Yorker will mean for his writing. Wood has been a fantastic critic for TNR -- but there are limitations within that role, and the New Yorker is and always has been an incubator for great writers who do genre crossover work. An argument can even be made that without the New Yorker, we wouldn't have narrative nonfiction, one of our most important and exciting modes of contemporary writing.

Truman Capote invented the genre using the New Yorker as a platform (In Cold Blood was first published as a New Yorker serial) and numerous other New Yorker writers who have come after him, among them Susan Orlean, Lawrence Wright, and Calvin Trillin, have kept the genre lively and fresh.

On a related note, Wood is married to novelist Claire Messud, whose The Emperor's Children (first couple of awkward paragraphs notwithstanding) bowled me over when I read it last Christmas. Messud isn't messing around when she writes fiction; she understands, in the way nineteenth-century novelists understood it, the power of social realism to reveal to us the inner workings, both ugly and beautiful, of our minds and our moments. Her earlier work is reaching toward the insight and capability of The Emperor's Children, and can be astonishing and annoying by turns (I am thinking of The Last Life)--but Messud's most recent novel is in a league of its own.

I thought about what was mesmerizing me about The Emperor's Children as I was reading it. And I think a lot of it had to do with my sense that Messud writes with a spirit that is more reminiscent of George Eliot or Trollope or James than of many of our writers today. Somehow, she manages to write about how narcissistic and inward-looking our world has become without falling into the trap of making narrative choices that simply replicate that narcissism on a stylistic and structural level. She's found an idiom that allows her to sensitively limn some of our most foundational cultural blindspots--and in this she is functioning with the empathy and observational acuity that the great Victorian realists possessed, updated and adapted for our time.