‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also bears the intervening influence of modernism, not least in its opening section in which, for twenty pages, our hero simply stands on the street thinking about his life.

In this episode, James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality.

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Read more in the LRB:

Saul Bellow talks to Melvyn Bragg:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n08/melvyn-bragg/in-conversation-with-melvyn-bragg-saul-bellow-talks-about-his-new-novel-and-about-the-women-of-eastern-europe⁠

Andrew O’Hagan on Saul Bellow’s letters:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n01/andrew-o-hagan/they-don-t-say-that-about-idi-amin⁠

James Wolcott on Bellow’s later life:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward⁠

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean Rhys, but if she had read ‘A Voyage in the Dark’ (1934), she might well have marvelled at, and even envied, its radical realism. Rhys’ story of a young woman who moves from the Caribbean to England and enters a world of financial and sexual exploitation was drawn from experiences unavailable to Woolf.

In this episode, James is joined by the biographer Miranda Seymour to discuss Rhys’s virtuosity of technique and detachment, her extraordinary ear for dialogue and the places where her mastery of realist method gave way to modernism.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Mary-Kay Wilmers on Jean Rhys: https://lrb.me/waorep701

Carole Angier on Rhys's letters: https://lrb.me/waorep702

In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of circulating consciousnesses in London over the course of one day. But underlying these innovations are the techniques of 19th-century realism, and in this episode James Wood explores what Woolf owes to Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character.

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Read more the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose on Woolf: https://lrb.me/realismep601

Gillian Beer on Woolf‘s essays: https://lrb.me/realismep602

David Trotter on ‘Mrs Dalloway’: https://lrb.me/realismep603

In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book ‘A Confession’, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (1886).

To discuss ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich‘ and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman. They consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening, and why the unique authority of his style has proved so resistant to the critiques of realism in the 20th century.

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Read more in the LRB:

Michael Wood on War and Peace: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep501⁠

James Meek on the death of Tolstoy: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep502⁠

John Bayley on Tolstoy's diaries: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep503⁠

‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and the ways in which each seeks to curb the judgment or expectations of the reader to foreground the experiences of his characters, even beyond death.

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Further reading in the LRB:

John Bayley on Chekhov's stories: https://lrb.me/realismep401

Donald Rayfield on Chekhov's love letters: https://lrb.me/realismep402

Joseph Frank on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep403

James Wood on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep404

Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present three humiliating episodes from his earlier life, offers no kind of conclusion. Instead, it is the unbearable moments of psychological truth that make ‘Notes from Underground’ a revolutionary development in the history of realism.

In this episode, James Wood is joined by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell to consider Dostoevsky’s mastery of the inner life and the experiences that shaped his hostility to rational egoism, from being subjected to a mock execution and four years in a Siberian prison camp to his reading of Hegel and a visit to London’s Crystal Palace.

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Read more in the LRB on Dostoevsky:

John Bayley: https://lrb.me/realismep301

Daniel Soar: https://lrb.me/realismep302

Michael Wood: https://lrb.me/realismep303

‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing.

In the second part of his analysis of ‘Madame Bovary’, James Wood considers the major episodes leading to Emma’s death and argues that what made Flaubert’s realism dangerous was not its depictions of infidelity, but its use of cliché to expose French bourgeois lives constructed entirely of received ideas and second-hand emotions.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Julian Barnes on translations of ‘Madame Bovary’: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep201⁠

Michael Wood on ‘Sentimental Education’: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep202⁠

Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together’.

In the first episode of his new series, James Wood considers the fears and criticisms that have dogged realism from its emergence in the 19th century through its long history of transformations up to the present day. He examines the ways in which Flaubert used detail (both significant and significantly insignificant), impersonal narration, lifelike dialogue and free indirect style to create realism’s essential grammar.

This is part one of James’s analysis of 'Madame Bovary', going up to the moment that Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger. He uses Geoffrey Wall's translation, published by Penguin Classics.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Julian Barnes: Flaubert at Two Hundred https://lrb.me/realismep101

Two Letters from Flaubert to Colet: https://lrb.me/realismep102

Tim Parks on Flaubert's life: https://lrb.me/realismep103

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood looks at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike.

James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’.

Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from the episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Books featured in the series:

Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall)

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Three stories by Anton Chekhov (UK: Bravo Ltd., from Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; USA: same edition, Modern Library)

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Vintage, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Mariner Books Classics)

Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Norton)

Saul Bellow, Seize The Day (Penguin Modern Classics)

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Vintage)

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (UK: Penguin Modern Classics; USA: Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Dag Solstad, Shyness & Dignity (Vintage, trans. Sverre Lyngstad)

Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag (UK: Faber and Faber, USA: New York Review Books Classics)

Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (UK: Granta Books; USA: New York Review Books Classics)