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How Fiction Works, by James Wood
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What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step.
The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.- Sales Rank: #333981 in Books
- Published on: 2008-07-22
- Released on: 2008-07-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.78" h x 1.13" w x 5.35" l, .74 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
About the Author
James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a visiting lecturer in English and American literature at Harvard. He is the author of two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and of a novel, The Book Against God.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Christopher Tilghman
James Wood is a critic who is brilliant on the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries and extremely harsh toward the writers of the postwar and early 21st. As a reviewer for the New Republic for many years, and since 2007 as a writer for the New Yorker, he has been unafraid to express his displeasure with the works of such heavyweights as Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo. He is a controversial figure, but the title of his new book, How Fiction Works, suggests an attempt to step above the literary fray and to speculate more broadly on narrative art. It turns out that Wood remains a critic, not a theoretician, and the real question he is addressing in this book is not what makes fiction work, but what makes the best fiction work better than the rest.
Wood's models for the "best" in fiction will not surprise either his admirers or his detractors. He has his contemporary favorites, but the models are the masters: Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, James and above all, never far from view, Flaubert. He tells us in his preface that the book "asks theoretical questions but answers them practically," and by practical, he means analysis of techniques as illustrated by a series of generally superb line-by-line readings. This is a technical book, a primer of sorts, of interest to the practicing writer but probably most useful and illuminating for the serious reader who enjoys the fictive ride and wants to take a look under the hood.
For Wood, the story is not what marks the best of fiction. Significantly -- perhaps it is a deliberate provocation -- this book entitled How Fiction Works is silent on fundamental aspects of storytelling -- structure and plot -- and only slightly interested in other traditional areas of theoretical concern. His book is about judging fiction's success, which for Wood depends less on event and more on "its abilities to delight us with more formal properties, like pattern and language." When a novel has failed, he tells us, it has "failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level."
So "how fiction works" for Wood is a question of how language can be successfully employed to manage this hunger, to achieve certain effects, some of them quite magical and most of them revolving around articulating, eliciting or manifesting the interior dramas of life. The examples he cites -- the use of metaphors and telling details, the lines of dialogue and depictions of thought -- are all very fine and perceptively analyzed. The great exploration of the modern novel, he argues, is this ever-more intimate journey into the consciousness of characters. From Jane Austen to James to Virginia Woolf, novelists have been perfecting the tools for dramatizing the psyche. Referring to a technique for representing thought that here might best be described as a kind of stream-of-consciousness, he says, "The history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style."
All of this is engagingly presented, and if for nothing more than the lucid explanation of the awkwardly named "free indirect style," I recommend it highly. But readers -- especially if those readers are young writers exploring their craft -- should recognize that Wood is being highly selective here; as he has his champions among writers, so he has his favorites among techniques. And on one point he appears inflexibly biased: The fiction he likes best is the fiction that tells itself. No noisy intrusions from the narrator; no transgressive postmodern authors appearing in their own creations; no eye-catching imagery that would tend to draw the reader's attention away from the scene. This is classic post-Jamesian realism, but some contemporary authors -- even some contemporary realists -- can be excused if they feel that Wood is tying their hands behind their backs.
Wood recognizes that he is leaving the contemporary author in rather a bind. He admits that "the Flaubertian legacy is a mixed blessing." As Brahms said of Beethoven, "You can't have any idea what it's like always to hear such a giant marching behind you." We can't imitate the great realism of the 19th century; if we do, we are left with the tired "commercial realism" of Updike and Graham Greene, two of Wood's whipping boys. "Novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so [the writer] has to try to outwit that inevitable aging," he says, but in How Fiction Works, he doesn't give us examples of authors who are doing this successfully.
Still, in the last chapter, called "Truth, Convention, Realism," he looks for a way forward. "The real . . . is at the bottom of my inquiries," he says at the beginning of the book, and here at the end he suggests that it might be a good first step to "throw the term 'realism' overboard" and to admit that life is "beyond anything the novel [has] yet grasped." He quotes the experimental French author Alain Robbe-Grillet -- who himself was all but quoting the Russian Formalist critic Roman Jakobson -- making his famous statement that "all writers believe they are realists." But now we are all left facing the questions Jakobson posed so well a century ago. What is the real? What kind of language and syntax captures it?
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wood takes aim at E.M. Forster's longtime standard-bearer Aspects of the Novel in this eminently readable and thought-provoking treatise on the ways, whys and hows of writing and reading fiction. Wood addresses many of the usual suspects—plot, character, voice, metaphor—with a palpable passion (he denounces a verb as pompous and praises a passage from Sabbath's Theater as an amazingly blasphemous little mélange), and his inviting voice guides readers gently into a brief discourse on thisness and chosenness, leading up to passages on how to push out, the contagion of moralizing niceness and, most importantly, a new way to discuss characters. Wood dismisses Forster's notions of flat or round characters and suggests that characters be evaluated in terms of transparencies and opacities determined not by the reader's expectations of how a character may act (as in Forster's formula), but by a character's motivations. Wood, now at the New Yorker and arguably the pre-eminent critic of contemporary English letters, accomplishes his mission of asking a critic's questions and offer[ing] a writer's answers with panache. This book is destined to be marked up, dog-eared and cherished. (Aug.)
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Most helpful customer reviews
141 of 158 people found the following review helpful.
The Magician's Secrets
By Charlus
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The most fun I had was writing criticism
By CrimeGuy
The most pretentious book I have ever read on writing - and I have read a LOT! Wood rambles on and on - often about a didactic nothing point - then turns around and disagrees with himself, constantly. The most fun I had was writing criticism! An awful book that wrongfully dissects every known ism of good writing - then decides just the opposite about the same point. Total waste.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By John B. Hickman
Provides helpful commentary.
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