It’s not every day that you get a chance to review your reviewer. It’s an opportunity that many writers would leap towards, and one that a few probably pray for. Here, I should declare an interest. I have been reviewed by James Wood, not once, but twice. There have been mentions too; one of them occurs in his new book, whose four chapters, bringing together memoir and criticism, relating the life to the practice, have been delivered before as lectures. These are acts of championing for which I’m grateful; coming from Wood, the foremost literary enthusiast of our time, even a mention is an important act of persuasion. I call him an “enthusiast” even before calling him a critic because fashioning a language with which to praise – not just authors, but the various facets of literature and reading – is a fundamental preoccupation, even an obsession, for Wood. To write of a man who has praised you is difficult, and maybe unwise. Yet it is the fact that he has praised and illuminated so much else that makes him of wider interest, just as the basic anomaly of his trajectory makes him intriguing. Here is a man who has made a successful career as an enthusiast in an age when literature has largely, in academia, been viewed with scepticism; he has been widely read, trusted and disagreed with in a time when the critic, even more than the author, is redundant.

By the 1980s, critical theory had begun to make inroads into the cocoon of Oxbridge, and Wood, who read English at Cambridge, refers to it in an interview as an “ideological bootcamp” whose intention was, apparently, to turn him into a theorist and detoxify him of his addiction to literature and, more specifically, the enchantment of literary language. By his own account, Wood escaped. The metaphor has not only to do with the guerrilla imagery favoured by the older avant garde, but is apposite to an era that would increasingly conflate and confuse the political with the internecine and the religious. Wood’s anachronistic article of faith was literature. He didn’t deny intellectual change; instead, he chose to “nick whatever was useful from theory” and follow his own path. The path led him to the Guardian, where, in 1991, he became chief literary critic and deputy literary editor.

The late 80s was a strange time for some of us, especially for those who were relatively young (as I was; Wood was even younger) and were trying to formulate some new-found investment in literary language’s ability to unsettle and engender what Wood (like DH Lawrence before him) calls “life”. The idea that there was something separate called “literary language”, the notion that there was something independent of language called “life”, to which an unequivocal meaning could be ascribed – all of these assumptions were not only being challenged by a vulgarised version of theory, but revealed to be (like market shares after a crash) a useless form of currency. I refer to a “vulgarised version of theory” because almost all the Ur- theorists – Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and others – were actually susceptible to, and eloquent about, the spell cast by the literary. To persist, in that climate, with a secular belief in the sacredness of writing, of life, required erudition, a respect for the opponent (theory) and what it could offer, and deep obstinacy. I speak, to an extent, from personal memory, but I’m also extrapolating on Wood’s behalf.

What was happening to the language of literary evaluation at this time, when literary departments had transformed into departments of sociology or of the history of cultural representation? It was largely appropriated and re-energised by the market. Publishers and agents began, almost exclusively, and with a new ebullience, to talk about “masterpieces”, “great books”, and “classics”, terms out of favour in the academy; some “masterpieces” were declared as such before they were even published. You suddenly had an inexhaustible run of first novels that were astonishing successes: something unknown in other historical epochs, in which reputations were achieved over time.

It should be noted that in boom-time the book market, too, speaks in the language of enthusiasm. It takes the language of literary canonisation (“classic”, “masterpiece”’) and blends it seamlessly with the upbeat terminology of commercial ebullience; that is, when a publisher refers to the latest “masterpiece” they are going to release into the market, they mean they expect it will sell 50,000 copies. No contemporary publisher describes a new book that may sell 500 copies as a “masterpiece”: the masterpiece, today, needs to earn out its advance – another example of how the market operates on prediction rather than retrospection. The market has to be enthusiastic (“bullish”, I think, is the right term), since its activities are predicated on success. How to learn, in such an ethos, from what Walter Benjamin, speaking of Franz Kafka, called “the purity and beauty” of a failure? How to disentangle the market’s relentless air of celebration – that permeates our view of the world now on many levels – from our own sense of wonder and need to praise? Wood, in some ways, presents us, in his account of the revelatory experience of reading fiction, with a complex modulation of Matthew Arnold’s view that poetry is a “substitute” for religion, and that the Bible could be read as a literary text. Of course, Arnold had the Anglican church to contend with and ironicise, as did his detractor TS Eliot after him. Wood, though born to believing parents (“engaged Christians”) in Durham and once a chorister, writes in a different time, in which the church has become metaphorical. The evangelical language he must contend with, distinguish his own from and which there is always a danger of inadvertently ventriloquising, is the language of the market – which is also, today, through institutions such as the Man Booker prize, inseparable from the language of literary evaluation.

In 1999, fed up with the Blairite-Thatcherite, or New Labour-Tory, consensus that presided over Britain, its culture, bookshops, books pages, TV channels and even the fiction published, I moved to Calcutta. Wood had left a few years earlier for America, for what I imagine must be a complex of reasons: he is married to the American novelist Claire Messud, but he also sensed, early on, that the cultural hegemony had shifted to America, and embraced the revivifying possibilities of its fictional tradition. He had grown tired, I recall, of the provincial decorum of the English novel; something in him longed for Willa Cather’s anonymous spaces. In this and other ways, Wood is more deeply Lawrentian than he might appear on first acquaintance. But the journey to America, described in The Nearest Thing to Life’s beautiful and open-ended final chapter, was also alive on other registers, and, in a sense, was an inversion of the Jamesian journey, in which the American must go to Europe to acculturate himself: to both visit a spiritual home and to experience homesickness. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the English critic, it seemed, would have to go to America, not to disseminate authority but to gain it – to “make it”, as the song about New York goes.

Wood’s journey, as an Englishman, is a pioneering one in this regard. Once he began to review for the New Republic and then the New Yorker, his opinions gathered an extraordinary authority. Subtly, though, he brought to those papers his multicultural English agendas, widening their scope: revered American journals were traditionally uninterested in the likes of Zia Haider Rahman, Teju Cole and even Geoff Dyer. On the other side of this authority was the man who overheard, after 18 years in America, the “beautiful American train horn, the crushed klaxon peal you can hear almost anywhere in the States” and still interpreted it through novelistic impressions of Cather that he had imbibed before he emigrated (“less like a horn than a sudden prairie wind or an animal’s cry”). It’s this sound and an ensuing train of thought that leads to the question: “How did I get here?”

Those who think Wood is too literary, too devoted to the canonical, should consider his use of the word “life”. He takes his title and epigraph from George Eliot: “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” This recalls Shelley: “The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.” Wood, in this book, celebrates the fact that the novel is where you encounter a multiplicity of humanity without any reference to their instrumental significance; and it is yourself you escape when you enter the lives of these others. To that end, fiction might have a purpose, even if it is nothing more than being lifted out of yourself; and to be lifted out of yourself has a curiously antagonistic relationship to living, given it resembles what happens to you when you die. Wood is concerned with death, too, in the book – it starts with a funeral, and it attends to the paradox that fiction’s vivid record of existence is conventionally expressed in the past tense. The life that is being captured is already over.

But there is another, more contradictory sense in which I think Wood uses the word “life”, a usage he has inherited from Lawrence, who, in “Why the Novel Matters”, claimed that the novel was the “one bright book of life”. In that essay, Lawrence states categorically: “Nothing is important but life”. Here, “life” constitutes a rebellion against the intellect on behalf of the primacy of physical existence. “We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it,” his essay begins, “or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it … It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it?”

I believe this primacy of physical existence is fundamental to Wood too; it is what makes him both an excellent reader and a marvellous memoirist, alive to the idiosyncratically revealing detail (“The dormitories were so cold in the morning that we learned how to dress in bed”), both from his childhood and in others’ writings. “Life” (we are back to the problem of the mid-80s, when theory informed us there was no such thing) is what generates and is generated by writing, and both exceeds and unsettles it. It is what can’t be wholly organised or mastered; to distinguish the presence of the “life-like” in a piece of writing from a staging of it requires a remarkable critic. Wood is often that critic. Echoing Lawrence’s attack on the “spirit”, the “soul” and the “mind” in his terrific third chapter on writer-critics, he reflects powerfully on Thomas De Quincey’s remark: “The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted: and yet the great majority trust to nothing else.” For what reason, then, should we turn to, or trust, Wood’s judgments? It would have to be for a quality of openness, of exploration. Lawrence opposed “life” to the classics, to the “great storehouse of eternity”, and to the “finished” – a word that can mean, in different contexts, polished, complete or dead. Again and again, Wood posits the completeness of the literary against its smaller, more volatile elements: the sentence, the phrase, the physical detail. He quotes repeatedly and beautifully, demonstrating that what is most compelling about writing can be invoked transiently but seldom possessed.

• Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad is published by Oneworld. To order The Nearest Thing to Life for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.