Only a certain breed of literary essay retains some starch. The book review, for example, with its formality and abstractions, its ego and aggression tamped down. Not for it the ecstasy of doubt; it trudges from certainty to certainty.

But in such strictures self announces itself in style. Think of Virginia Woolf’s unsigned reviews in The Times Literary Supplement. The “anonymity was ideal,” James Wood explains. “Surely Woolf knew that her prose had to sign itself. So her essays, both in texture and in content, were self-advertisements.” This is true too of Wood himself, a staff writer at The New Yorker, with his clearly delineated — and undeviating — theory of how fiction works and what it must do. Raised in the evangelical tradition, he possesses a faith in fiction that is absolutist, and teleological; “It was not just the ascent of science but perhaps the ascent of the novel that helped to kill off Jesus’s divinity,” he has written. He reads messianically, with a hunger for fiction to answer the questions religion once did.

Wood’s new book, THE FUN STUFF: And Other Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27), possesses many of the pleasures of his previous collections “The Broken Estate” (1999) and “The Irresponsible Self” (2004): the same tight weave, the laconic humor, the genius for metaphor (Flaubert, “the agonist of style, assassinated repetitions like insects.”). He keeps bringing us back to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Flaubert — about the old masters, Wood is never wrong — founts of psychological insight. No one is better at alerting us to influences with such gossipy familiarity: just as Orwell “almost certainly” got his “eye for didactic detail from Tolstoy,” Wood tells us, Ian McEwan in turn “learned quite a lot about narrative stealth and the control of disgust from Orwell.” And no critic gets closer to the text. Wood writes that Edmund Wilson “seems to rear panoptically above his subjects, like a statue overseeing a city square.” Wilson looms over the work; Wood seems to speak from within it. On Norman Rush’s “Mating”: “The novel has the air at times of a once fatter man whose thinner frame is now making his skin sag a bit: there are abrupt transitions and sudden deposits of information.” He is critic as coroner, reporting on the source of life or root of disease. He can be surprisingly squeamish, though; he shudders at how Wilson would “happily gut a living novelistic organism with the blunt blade of précis.”

But “The Fun Stuff” is notable for what it does not include. There is no introduction. Wood establishes no unifying thesis or theme. For a writer so fond of system building, the silence is puzzling. Our most consistent critic is changing. In his tightly pleached arguments, he’s making room for the reader, and a fresh inquiry. He’s moving past fiction’s possibilities to linger on its limitations, on the books that explore what happens when language becomes insufficient and storytelling breaks down. How the starved sentences of Lydia Davis’s later stories flirt with muteness and leak grief. How “Leaving the Atocha Station,” an American-abroad novel by the poet Ben Lerner, reaches “for what cannot be disclosed or confessed in narrative.” How “The Road,” Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic Grand Guignol, evades its own crucial question: “As long as language can be used to recount the worst, then the worst has not arrived. . . . When does narrative, language end?”

We see too his attraction to narratives of exile, unreliable memory and uneasy citizenship, to people “mugged by history,” as he describes the Bosnian-born writer, Aleksandar Hemon. Wood loves the forked consciousness, the immigrant’s delight in refreshing the English language’s possibilities — Nabokov and Hemon’s taste for the oddly pronged adjective or the “enraptured and faintly alienated” perspective of Joseph O’Neill’s Dutch narrator of “Netherland,” who sees New York as a “garbage of light.” “The Fun Stuff” features exhilarating readings of Hemon and O’Neill, W. G. Sebald, Ismail Kadare and V. S. Naipaul. Few can parse with as much economy and sophistication how estrangement corrodes and strengthens character, sharpens and clouds perception. He’s interested in what we do with our wounds — how, for the outsider and immigrant, knowledge can be protection; mastery, revenge. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language,” a young Naipaul wrote home to his family in Trinidad during his lonely years studying at Oxford. Seeded in Wood’s essay on George Orwell is his connection to such stories: he was a scholarship boy at Orwell’s own school, Eton, “alternately grateful for its every expensive blessing and yearning to blow it up.” He understands the wages of “productive shame.”