A British father goes to visit his daughter, a philosophy professor at an American university, in Upstate New York, where snowy weather keeps the family inside, contemplating the human condition.
Wood will...remain renowned for his criticism and not for his fiction because his criticism, honed over three decades, is superb, while his novels...are 'merely' very good. True to their author’s voice, these are careful works that resist controversy beyond the fact that they exist, show a calm, colorful command of language, and are absorbing to read ... Wood lives in his head and so do his characters, and that will never be everyone’s cup of tea ... But is it paranoid to theorize that in a few cases resentments are at play, scores being settled? ... Might these rare Wood novel releases occasion payback from protective critics avenging the big-game novelists Wood has hunted ... Or might some critics be envious of Wood’s talents ... Upstate displays a master unobtrusively practicing what he preaches. If Wood is guilty of anything, it is a formal conservatism ... His cherished free-indirect narrative approach allows for naturalistic flows of memory ... The prose is easy and confident ... Those seeking heart-stopping plot turns should walk away. That’s not what Wood does ... An unassuming, carefully crafted story about devotion and quiet commitment? In 2018, that is subversive.
This isn’t a particularly ambitious novel. Wood doesn’t attempt to redeem British fiction ... As a British novelist living in the US he chooses to focus on transatlantic differences, but it’s hard to address these without resort[ing] to cliche ... Nonetheless, Wood does succeed in both achieving verisimilitude and revealing its artifice. Though all the characters verge on caricature, they are convincingly alive in a way that those in his previous novel were not ... it’s also through them that he enables the why question to take on life – and therefore to matter. He creates a world where we can’t know whose point of view to accept, and therefore can’t know whether to dismiss Vanessa’s fear that 'everything that is most dear to you will eventually be taken from you' as hysterical anxiety or to accept it as wisdom.
It is not necessary that we, the reader, understand, as an analyst might seek to understand, the origin in such a character of a constitution permanently afflicted by the dread of existential nothingness. However, it is very necessary—if the book is to lift itself from the quotidian to the metaphorical—that we feel that dread; and feel it so strongly we connect anew with our own experience of the humdrum anxiety embedded in daily life. If we do not, all is summary and surface. And the latter, I am much afraid, is what prevails in Upstate.
