This, I thought when I arrived to meet James Wood, is no place for a literary critic to be staying – a boutique hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan that offers “karma rewards”, including “spa credits”, to frequent guests. In the lobby, the lift disgorged corporate fixers, high-styled hipsters, Japanese tourists festooned with electronic gadgets, and then the incongruous figure of Wood – slightly hunched, donnishly inward-looking despite his smile, a man who lives in books and who in The Nearest Thing to Life praises novels for a “hospitality” that is probably more welcoming than the hotel’s “luxurious Frette linens”, “in-room yoga mats” and “signature animal-print robes”.

We talked in a black den where an espresso machine hissed like an angry dragon in a corner. “It’s an experiment,” said Wood about the place where he’d spent the night away from his home in Boston. “Anyway, in America, I’m often the only literary critic in the hotel!” Wherever you find him, he is a rarity: not an abstract theorist or an analytical mechanic but a writer for whom criticism is a way of proselytising for literature and narrowing the gap between art and life.

Born in Durham in 1965, he was a choirboy at the local cathedral, then went to Eton on a music scholarship. After reading English at Cambridge, he tried his luck as a hack and immediately became a prized reviewer on the Guardian. In 1995 he moved to America to work at the New Republic; he is now one of the New Yorker’s select band of staff writers, and also teaches at Harvard, where he is professor of the practice of literary criticism, a title that proclaims his scepticism about theory and his delight in “poking around in the dark”, as he puts it, to explore the practicalities of literary language.

Wood’s new book is as much autobiographical as critical: why should there be a difference, because the books whose vital “lifeness” he extols saved his own life when he was growing up as a minister’s son in Durham? The atmosphere at home was strict, high-minded, earnestly evangelical. “I was escaping from things,” Wood said, “hiding from things, but also discovering things that might be prohibited. Though my parents didn’t run a despotic regime, novels gave me a freedom to think and to be that was not found within the gospels.”

Rebellion or rejection were possible, and in 2003 Wood published a novel called The Book Against God, about a glum refugee from Durham and from Anglicanism who can’t finish an eponymous PhD thesis, which he refers to as BAG. Yet Wood’s own critical books aren’t written against God, despite the fact that literary criticism derives from the so-called higher criticism of the Victorians, which questioned divinity. Instead he has chosen to treat literature as a secular scripture. By fixing on humdrum domestic details, novels, he says, redeem life and rescue it from its sad ephemerality; a book is not solitary, like the person who reads it, but dispenses “proximity, fellow-feeling, compassion, communion”. So isn’t he evangelising for literature, like the preachers whose ministrations he didn’t want to hear in his youth?

“I suppose,” he said, “that I am taking a religious view of a form that’s very earthly, and there’s some tension between my approach and that worldliness. Cambridge was ideological bootcamp: they broke me of my stubborn liberal humanism and wanted to reconstruct me as a literary theorist. It took me three years to figure out that what I needed to do was nick whatever was useful from theory, and emerge on the other side still speaking what Samuel Johnson called ‘a Christian dialect’.”

It’s typical of Wood’s conscience to worry about the ethics of fictional technique. In The Nearest Thing to Life, he is troubled by the omniscience that novelists claim, which gives them a “priestly” access to the souls and secrets of their characters, and he is mildly sarcastic about Nabokov’s assumption that “the writer, who fashions humans from ribs, is God Himself”. Talking to me, he brooded about “the eeriness, the uncanniness of this power of surveillance” – a word that, after Edward Snowden’s revelations, links novelistic eavesdropping on thoughts with the NSA’s invasions of privacy.

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Wood is unembarrassed about citing a purported saviour as a model for both novels and novel-readers. “We want the good Jesus not the bad Jesus, the one who says we all sin together, not the one who knows what we’re thinking and says that thoughts are actionable because to look on someone with lust is to commit adultery. There’s a great joke about Jesus when he defends the adulterous woman by saying, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Jesus then gets caught on the forehead by a pebble; he looks up and says, ‘Mother, I told you to go home!”’

Like all jokes, this covers a contradiction: it stretches piety but stays far short of blasphemy. Could there, I asked Wood, be such a thing as a religious novel – a book that is positively for God, not against him?

“Probably not,” he replied. “I can only think of bad Christian novels, like Graham Greene’s. There are mystical novels – To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway – and in The Brothers Karamazov you have something like the iconostasis in a Russian Orthodox cathedral: certain panels, like those about Father Zossima or the parable of the grand inquisitor, uphold the faith that Dostoevsky undermines elsewhere. Maybe Moby-Dick qualifies too, though at the cost of being undramatic or essayistic or poetic. Perhaps narrative is inherently secular. It corrugates things, bends them too much to stay religious, as Dostoevsky wisely feared. Among contemporaries, Marilynne Robinson comes closest in Gilead, which is about a Congregationalist pastor in Iowa who’s dying – though she has to sacrifice a lot of the novel’s innate comedy and dynamism on the altar of high thought. The novel is a comic form, because it’s about our absurdities and failings. We’re told that Jesus wept, but never that he laughed.”

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Wood argues in his book that Shakespearean soliloquies are “uttered privacy, which has its roots in prayer”. I pointed out that Claudius prays hypocritically in Hamlet because he can’t repent, and that when Henry V prays on the night before the battle he’s addressing a fickle God who always sides with the victors. “So that makes them failed prayers,” said Wood. “The history of consciousness in fiction has to start with the psalms, where David is singing before the lord, and I suppose it ends in 19th-century novels where we have characters speaking aloud – not communicating with God but with the mind of the reader, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady when Henry James has her sit in a room alone for several hours pondering the failure of her marriage. Later on, Saul Bellow’s characters do directly question God or argue with him. When Wilhelm in Seize the Day pauses on Broadway with a queer look on his face and his eyes turned upwards, isn’t he praying?”

Wood began his teaching career by collaborating with Bellow in a course at Boston University. Was that like serving as one of God’s representatives on Earth? “Well, he was a damaged God. He was losing his memory of recent events, but his deep memory was intact. My job was to touch that nerve of recollection, so I’d ask him about Chicago in the 1930s and he was off, bringing it all back again.”

His complex role as Bellow’s apostle, therapist and talkshow host exemplifies the intimacy of his dealings with the writers whose work he admires. The critic, for him, resembles the actor who brings a Shakespearean text to life, or a pianist – his example is Alfred Brendel – who sits at the keyboard and vivifies the score’s silent notes. Wood’s closest relationship is with a novelist: he is married to Claire Messud, best known for The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs, and the delicate equilibrium between them may explain why he has not written a second novel. “Actually, living with a novelist is harder than writing one of your own,” he told me. “You need all your spousal tenderness at the moment when you take a hostile review in to the loved one!”

Wood and Messud have a son and daughter, who are growing up, to his amazement, to be “totally American”, in a world that is audiovisual, not literary. Do they immerse themselves in books, as he did at their ages? “I don’t see any signs of it,” he said. A stray comment in The Nearest Thing to Life mentions the solemn obligation to attend his daughter’s dance recital – the sort of event, he says with a grimace, that always happens in a school gymnasium. Other spousal responsibilities weighed on Wood later in the day: Messud teaches creative writing one day a week in New York, and Wood, passing her in the air, was due to dash back to Boston by plane after we spoke so as to do the school run.

Qualms of conscience remain about art’s truth-telling and its incorrigible lies. “I’m always trying to work out how real fiction is, how one can live in an entirely controlled freedom and still feel genuinely free. That’s why I’m so fixated on details, like the ‘cherry-coloured twist’ in Beatrix Potter’s Tailor of Gloucester – the satin sewn around the buttonhole on a coat – though when my mother read that story to me it suggested liquorice or sherbet twists at the sweet shop. That’s the source of my fascination with Roland Barthes. For me, he’s a guilty realist: why’s he so drawn to murdering a realism that you’d think he’d have advanced beyond? He’s much more Protestant than he’d have let on, afflicted by his puritanism about artifice. In his book on photography, what he calls the punctum, the thing in an image that pierces or slays you, is always the accidental detail – a scuffed shoe, a belt not done up properly – rather than something that’s planned or posed by an author. It’s even truer with novels. The whole became hazy, but the details remain distinct. After all, that’s how one remembers a life.”

The remark has an elegiac undertone. The Nearest Thing to Life begins at a memorial service for the brother of one of Wood’s friends, and it is dedicated to Wood’s mother, who died last year. She makes a touching appearance in the book, rendezvousing with him at choir practice to hand over emergency supplies, including fresh socks, that he needed at boarding school.

“Novels,” said Wood, “bring people back from the dead on the page, only to kill them a second time – to cast them into the past tense. The magic of fiction is an apparent resurrection.” But does that consolation carry over into life? “When I wrote that passage about my mother, she had just taken the fall that would send her to bed, never to rise from it again. In fact when I started writing it, she hadn’t yet taken the fall, so I now wonder if I sensed that she was leaving us anyway. Like most middle-aged people, I feel myself living more and more in the blessed world of childhood, which for me is the lost world of England. That’s what I mean by talking in the book about expatriation, nostalgia and ‘secular homelessness’ – my equivalent to the ‘transcendental homelessness’ of the romantic wanderer.”

Shakespearean plays happen in a perpetual present, but novels are inevitably retrospective, thanks in part to the past historic tense they’re usually written in. That confirms Wood’s sense of regret, or what he calls, in his reflections on growing up in Durham, “afterwardness”. Teaching, even at Harvard, has made him question whether literature might be wasted on the young. “It’s very difficult explaining The Portrait of a Lady to 20-year-olds, because it’s about choices and consequences, about the realisation that the world is smaller than it seems. Understanding novels requires wisdom, which it takes decades of living to acquire.”

In his preface to The Portrait, James quotes George Eliot’s defence of the “smaller female fry” who are prototypes for Isabel: “In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection.” Wood’s rueful memories – the ageing Bellow, his dying mother – and his reliance on literature to compensate us for our losses made me think of that resounding phrase. His balding but not at all frail head is the vessel in which the treasures of literature are gathered to be protected from time. But the treasury Wood guards is not merely aesthetic: books are safety-deposit boxes for human affection, like urns that contain words not ashes.

The Nearest Thing to Life is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £9.99