James Wood writes a sentence. But first this sentence from Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, about the killer falcons employed by the church to kill pigeons:

“Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter.”

This is what James Wood has to say about that sentence:

Much of the most successfully daring postwar fiction has been by writers committed to the long dramatic sentence (Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago). Bolaño is in their company: the quotation here is broken off of a phrase that takes about a page in the book. The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño’s ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence — impossibly, like someone punting a leaf — image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. It could so easily be too much, and somehow isn’t, the flight of fancy anchored by precision and a just-suppressed comedy. (In Spain, amusingly, the falcons are too old or docile for killing, and the priests have none of the dangerous elegance of their French or Italian counterparts.) Likewise, this fantasia about falcons in every European city might have been thuddingly allegorical or irritatingly whimsical, and isn’t. It is comically plausible, and concretely evoked; the surrealism lies in the systematic elaboration of the image. The Catholic Church is likened to a bird of prey, murderous and blood-red in its second capital, Avignon, and we are free to link this, without coercion, to the Chilean situation and the ethical somnolence of Father Urrutia.

Often in his reviews, James Wood writes like the author he is reviewing, whether it be Flaubert or Chekhov. Or Bolaño. And, as we know from the more scathing reviews he has done, he can also write like Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, and John Updike. But it is not the mimeticism that is so interesting; what is extraordinary each time one encounters his prose is its energy and the fierce sense of discovery. Other critics appear pallid and unambitious in comparison. Just look at last Sunday’s NYTBR: nearly everything else has the texture of tissue on a rain-soaked pavement.

(While you’re looking at the Sunday paper, also check out my man Carlo Rotella’s boxing piece on Shannon Briggs, with photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. And talking of boxing, Mohsin Hamid spars with Deborah Solomon.)