Claire Messud, Fintan O’Toole, James Wood
Literary Charisma: A Conversation
What makes a literary figure charismatic? What kinds of words convey charisma, and how much do we project? Why are we drawn to antiheroes—are we attracted by those whose characters we often condemn, and why? Does the charisma of a particular author affect our reading of their texts (think of Hemingway)? How does the absolutely ordinary become so interesting that it may fill six volumes and gain worldwide readers (think of Knaausgaard, and other forms of autofiction)? Does charisma work differently in children’s literature than in adult fiction? Can one detect charisma in a figure who hasn’t lived long enough for their lives to be intriguing (think of Ferrante, Messud)? Is Kehlmann’s Tyll charismatic? Or is charisma an appropriate category for literature at all?
Claire Messud is the author of numerous novels including When the World Was Steady (1995), The Last Life (1999), The Woman Upstairs (2013), and The Emperor’s Children (2006), which won the Massachusetts Book Award in 2007. Her latest novels are The Burning Girl (2017) and This Strange Eventful History, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024. Messud received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, the Strauss Living Award granted through the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 2015 to 2025 she was professor of creative writing at Harvard University; Messud is currently a senior lecturer in English at Yale.
Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, is a columnist for The Irish Times and Leonard L. Milberg ’53 visiting lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. His books on politics include the bestsellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (2021), and Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018). In 2023, Fintan O’Toole was named an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as member of the Advisory Board of the Einstein Forum.
James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007 and is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. He was the chief literary critic at The Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. He also serves as member of the Advisory Board of the Einstein Forum. His critical essays have been collected in three volumes, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Fun Stuff, and Other Essays (2012). He has written a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works (2008), and two novels, The Book Against God (2003), and Upstate (2018).