How Fiction Works

For those seriously interested in Lit Crit, this is probably required reading. Although Wood is a mainstream literary celebrity, his personal preferences are somewhat eccentric. As discussed in depth elsewhere his fondness for what he calls "free indirect style" which is a kind of confusion between 3rd and 1st person narrative would be ruled a simple POV violation by most.

The model for this book is John Ruskin's, "The Elements of Drawing," intended as a primer to help the practicing painter, the art-lover, or curious viewer. Ruskin, a perceptive critic of painting and architecture, fostered art appreciation, but could not realistically have expected his readers to become good artists. Wood, who writes with sensitivity and wit about literature, wishes to help readers better notice what they are reading, but certainly does not expect them to become good writers. He would likely count it a hard-won success to allay a little "the contagion of moralizing niceness" that he censures in book reviewers who complain about dislikeable characters. Not to fear. The well of human tragedy never runs dry, and thankfully some writers are always drawn to it. Writing about novelists' use of detail to describe "reality," Wood notes that literature helps us to better notice the details of life, which in turn makes us better notice details in literature, and so on. Most young readers are poor noticers. Twenty-year olds are relative virgins because they have not yet read enough literature to be taught how to read. Experience matters, whether in life, sex, reading, or writing. Nothing here suggests that reading well and closely, as hard as it is, by itself makes one a better writer. And yet, can it not be that Wood's long practice of careful reading contributes to the quality of his writing? Wood quotes a favorite image from Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day." The detail reflects the linkage between criticism, reading and writing. Mr. Rappaport smokes a cigar. "A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency." It is one thing to appreciate the perfect, ghostly ash, another to savor the mildly narcotic smoke, and yet something else to create it - doubtless a fine, hand-rolled, Cuban. Alas, the mass-manufactured stogies are never as good.

I should say up front that James Wood is living my dream. A staff writer for the New Yorker, chief literary critic for The Guardian, professor of the practice of criticism at Harvard University, and a respected novelist to boot (and he's only five years older than I am!), Wood might be the closest thing we have to a successor to Edmund Wilson. So any criticisms that follow can probably be chalked up to little more than jealousy--the literary equivalent of suggesting that Wood has fat ankles. How Fiction Works is a compact, even squat little hardcover, the very materiality of which seems bent on recalling an era and ethos of reading "before theory," as it were. Somehow the 4.5" x 7" format--coupled with wide margins, classic font, and running page heads that indicate the content of each page--manage to evoke the sorts of predecessors that Wood himself invokes: Ruskin's Elements of Drawing and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. The materiality of the book primes a certain approach, a certain horizon of expectation for the reader and seems to effect a first shift in readerly stance that Woods' criticism would encourage: attention to the craft. If the title sounds like a dreary, mechanical textbook for Creative Writing classes the world over, in fact the book is as much for readers as writers. This is a work of criticism, not a Writers-Workshop-in-a-box. Nor is this a book which sets out to demystify the novel as if Wod were a member of the guild willing to share with us the secrets of the illusionist. While it is attentive to concrete realities of mechanics, How Fiction Works is not a disenchantment of the novel, disclosing to us the code or formula that makes fiction work. In fact, any reader will thank Wood for breaking open fiction in new ways in the opening chapter on narration alone. Like all good criticism, Wood names and articulates our intuitions and gut reactions. For instance, he names exactly the discomfort I have long felt about straight-up, confident, magisterial third person narration one finds in someone like Jane Austen (or Joyce Carol Oates, for that matter?). On this point he cites W.G. Sebald: Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history. Wood goes on to provide a breezy but profound analysis of different kinds of narration which almost turns into a reverie on free indirect style. In this context he provides a stinging critique of Updike's failures in this respect in his 2006 novel, Terrorist, where the narrator's language refuses to bend "toward its characters and their habits of speech." Of course, some novels are exercises and experiments bent on seeing the extent to which this is possible. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury comes to mind, but

The retro cover says it all. Farrar, Straus knew that it had the next big thing and that the next big thing consisted of a return to the best of the past. The book is receiving a great deal of attention, confirming their prescience. How Fiction Works is a study of something that is very old-fashioned these days: craft. It is an examination of key elements of fiction and how they are most fully utilized by skilled writers. The vast majority of the writers examined here are canonical ones--another old-fashioned touch. The book is also cognizant of the nuances of narrative history and (a more modern touch) draws on popular culture for key insights. In short, this is a delightful, perceptive "book" book. First and foremost, it is an exceptional read. It is opinionated (though not abusive or flippant) and is a nice example of something that many modern students may never have seen before--judicial criticism. Frye famously argued that judicial criticism is passé, now that we realize that literary "quality" is like the stock market. Particular authors' "stock" rises and falls, depending on generational interests, so we should not concern ourselves with evaluative judgments. That is all very nice, except for the fact that reviewers, referees, acquisition editors and agents are forced to make evaluative judgments and in a world in which 800,000 books are published annually, readers seek help and advice from putative experts. The book takes part of its inspiration from E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, an interesting little book that has enjoyed some influence. How Fiction Works goes well beyond Forster (sometimes on issues which Forster is associated with specifically, e.g., the distinction between `flat' and `round' characters). This is a book for both critics and practitioners. It wears its erudition lightly, in the English mode, but its thoughts are often weighty and its insights acute (e.g. the notion that the French are suspicious of realism because of the function of the preterite in their language). The book is a must read for teachers and students of narrative, both for the importance of its arguments and for its function as an exemplar of what once functioned as "criticism" and might so function once again.

James Wood conducts a concise but edifying tour behind the curtain of novel making, aimed primarily at the student and interested layperson. He examines the techniques used by the novelist that readers routinely take for granted. By spotlighting and defamiliarizing them, he demonstrates how they have evolved over the centuries, including examples of both good and bad usage. Topics include free indirect style, the conciousness of characters, reality in fiction, successful use of metaphor and simile, different registers of tone, among others. One of his most interesting discussions is on characters: how have different writers approached creating characters, including a history of critical responses to those approaches. This is typical of Wood's modus operandi: take a basic component of novel writing and examine the assumptions we make as readers in order to understand and use what we are reading; what are the conventions writers and readers have evolved, and how did they come into being. Wood's style here is mostly shorn of the metaphors that illuminate his prior collections of criticism; the writing is invariably clear and succinct. My only disappointment was in his episodic inability to refrain from revealing key plot points (i.e. Anna and the train) that may diminish the pleasure for future readers. This is the best book I know to make one a more observant and appreciative reader.