Tucked into a quiet corner of YouTube, away from the heavy traffic of skateboarding nuns and slapstick cats, there is a short film of the New Yorker critic James Wood finger-drumming on a kitchen table. He's very good. His palms produce a thudding bass, his fingers tap out a fiddly syncopated tattoo, and his nails rattle a coffee mug into life as an improvised cymbal. Like all good drum solos, it is both measured and gleefully anarchic. No wonder it provokes a child off-camera into gurgles of delight.

When I first saw this clip in 2008, I mentally filed it away under the heading "Critics Do The Funniest Things", and thought no more about it. Wood's hidden talent seemed no more relevant to his work as a book reviewer than would be the case if John Carey suddenly declared a passion for yodelling, or Michiko Kakutani whipped out a set of bagpipes. Only with the publication of his latest collection of essays does it finally make sense.

The Fun Stuff, the essay from which this volume takes its title, opens with a celebration of Keith Moon, The Who's fêted and fated drummer, whose "many-armed, joyous, semaphoring lunacy" originally inspired Wood to take up the drums as a boy. The "fun stuff", it turns out, is the half-bar of filler in a song during which the drummer can spiral off into a few moments of happy mayhem before returning to his main job of keeping the beat going. Only in Moon's case sometimes he didn't stop there. Because he made it up as he went along, his drumming was all filler, all fun stuff. And for a dutiful public schoolboy such as Wood, this "spilling energy" demonstrated not a lack of discipline but a "dream of escape".

The literary parallel Wood makes is with syntax. The "ideal sentence of prose", he suggests, would be similarly torn between order and disorder, at once "formally controlled and joyously messy". On the evidence of his published criticism, it is also what he most enjoys about the novel. A novelist's work, like a drummer's, is mostly done in the background, without drawing too much attention to itself. Yet there are also passages that rise from the surface of the page to startle readers out of their complacency, and no critic is better than Wood at pointing them out.

Repeatedly in these 25 essays, his eye singles out those moments where writers outdo themselves, transcending their own habitual style, such as Alan Hollinghurst describing in The Line of Beauty how "Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights." This is fiction's fun stuff, and Wood is an impressive guide through it: learned and puckish, sympathetic and stringent.

Wood initially gained his reputation as a sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued reviewer of contemporary fiction, and on the evidence presented here he has lost none of his early zeal for pricking inflated reputations. He is especially tough on Paul Auster for writing prose that is "sodden with cliché", in which "accidents attack the narrative like automobiles falling out of the sky". But even writers he rates are chided for their flaws  Thomas Hardy's "grinding plots"; Ian McEwan's fondness for "thrillerish defamiliarisation".

Inevitably, when a critic talks this tough, he leaves himself open to the accusation that he is attacking something he understands only as an outsider. (Wood's one attempt at a novel, The Book Against God, wore its self-consciousness lightly, but it bore the same relationship to really good fiction that a painting-by-numbers kit does to a Picasso.) The critic is a eunuch offering sex tips; a teetotaler giving tasting notes.

Of course, literary criticism cannot avoid sharing the same medium as its subject. Opera critics do not deliver their reviews as arias; art critics do not paint or sculpt theirs. Only literary critics have to work with the same basic material as the works they are handling  words on the page  and in drawing attention to how other writers use language they always risk revealing their own stylistic tics.

Wood's prose is a model of compact energy. He is fond of striking adjective-noun pairings, such as Edmund Wilson's "synoptic voraciousness" or Auster's "laughable seriousness", lassooing a writer's essential features with a single loop of language. From time to time he dips into his reading, finding parallels that are presumably intended to be caught out of the corner of the reader's eye, as when he writes of the "mute, inglorious lives of ordinary people" that history should celebrate (with a quiet nod to Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"), or the pain in László Krasznahorkai's fictional world that "goes on, can't go on, must go on" (wham, bam, thank you Sam). It is calm and coolly measured writing, but frequently interrupted by exclamation marks ("and how much is accomplished here!"), like someone letting off a firework in a library.

Put another way, Wood's criticism at its best displays its own kind of "spilling energy". On page after page, it seduces readers through force of argument and then ambushes them with an unexpected roll of language: Aleksandar Hemon is "a postmodernist who has been mugged by history"; Bible verses joined by "and" move forward "like the hands of those large old railway-station clocks that jolted visibly from minute to minute".

Perhaps inevitably, in a collection of previously published pieces, there are some repetitions. Twice we are told about Tolstoy's Rostov hearing a rattle of rifle fire "as if someone had spilled nuts"; twice we are told about Orwell's description of a condemned man swerving to avoid a puddle on his way to the gallows. But some things are worth hearing more than once, and the overall impression left by this collection is not familiarity but surprise. Some of the writers discussed will be new to some readers, but viewed through Wood's eyes, even the best-known novels slip off their jackets and appear before us looking naked and strange.

 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a judge of the 2013 Man Booker Prize.

If literary criticism no longer enjoys the privileged cultural position it occupied in the middle of the 20th century, the same cannot be said of James Wood. Chief book reviewer for the New Yorker and visiting lecturer at Harvard, the English expat is probably the Anglophone world's most esteemed literary critic.

With his intimidating seriousness and near religious belief in the moral possibilities of the novel, Wood can seem like a throwback to that era of Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, FR Leavis and William Empson, when books weren't reviewed so much as stringently evaluated for a higher purpose.

Certainly when Wood reviews an author, he stays reviewed. The novelist Jonathan Lethem was so chastened by the experience that a whole eight years after Wood's review of The Fortress of Solitude was published, he wrote a lengthy essay attacking the critic's "blanketing tone of ruminative mastery".

That ruminative mastery is much in evidence in Wood's new collection, The Fun Stuff. The title  a rare flash of openly ironic humour  refers to the lead essay, a beautiful exposition of Wood's teenage ardour for the manic drumming of the Who's Keith Moon. Trained as a classical musician at Eton, Wood sought liberation in the percussive chaos produced by the notoriously self-destructive hedonist.

It's hard to imagine the sternly pensive Wood succumbing to such flamboyant beat-keeping. But as he writes revealingly of Moon's idiosyncratic style: "For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence of prose, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong."

Wood's prose is seldom if ever wrong. Instead it tends to be dense but painstakingly constructed, bedecked in extensive reading, layered argument and piercing observation. Sometimes that recipe can seem a little forbidding within the pages of a magazine, even one as august as the New Yorker. Perhaps it's the greater sense of air, but the setting of a book allows the essays to breathe more freely, and the references to accumulate less dauntingly.

For when Wood discusses WG Sebald, for example, it's with the benefit of having read and recognised the influence of Thomas Bernhard and Adalbert Stifter. He will also have noted the debt to Joseph Roth in the work of Aleksandar Hemon, even if it escapes Hemon himself. And only Wood would point out that while Richard Yates's stories are often likened to John Cheever's, they are closer to JF Power's.

Hisessay on Yates demonstrates what a relentless intelligence can achieve in well-travelled territory by providing an intensely subtle appreciation of the author's finest work. So finely argued and culturally rich is Wood's understanding of Revolutionary Road that his contention that it is a clever rewriting of Madame Bovary seems less a literary opinion than a moral certainty. Thus persuaded, we greet the notion that the book's hero, Frank Wheeler, is a hypocritical combination of Charles Bovary and Emma Bovary as a moment of penny-dropping intellectual revelation.

The gift of the great critic is to be able to explain complex concepts to the reader in a manner that is neither bamboozling nor patronising. Although demanding of the reader's attention, Wood has this gift, but perhaps his most impressive facility  and one apparently lost on Lethem  is his willingness to pay authors the compliment of taking their work as seriously as they take it themselves.

You never feel that he shortchanges his subjects, regardless of whether or not they earn his approval. He excoriates Paul Auster, it's true, and in such devastating fashion that you hope that the quintessential New Yorker doesn't subscribe to the New Yorker. But it's not a lazy hatchet job. Wood has done the work. He's read Auster's oeuvre and his contempt for it stems from careful diligence rather than casual spite.

That distinction may necessarily be lost on the receiving author, but it's one worth treasuring for the discerning reader. It means that this is a book that's impossible to read without gaining a greater appreciation of what it means to write well, both in the case of the work under review and, just as pleasurably, the reviews themselves.