Customer Reviews

How Fiction Works

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

Too much micro-analysis, too little attention to the whole; too much scorn for the "popular," too much delight in his own prose ("Nearly all of Muriel Spark's novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved"), way too much jargon ("Characterological relativity"? Really?).

Wood is intensely interested in small things. In use of detail, in single phrases and sentences, in rhythm and vocabulary. Which is fine, and I gave the book two stars instead of one because he makes useful observations about the construction of prose. His section on "The Rise of Detail" was particularly good, and I plan on rereading and making use of it.

But he pays no attention to the entire novel. He spends page after page after page rhapsodising about single sentences and details. Saul Bellow's description of flying, he enthuses, tells the reader exactly what flying feels like. "And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence." (Yep, that's been my entire experience of flying up to this point. I blandly inhabit a deprived eloquence.) What the entire novel does, why we might read it, what effect the whole sweep of it might have on us, and (most important for a book called How Fiction Works) how the writer constructed it-all of these things are ignored.

He's also a snob. He loathes something he calls "commercial realism," a style which "lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling," and instead praises the obscure, the high, and the literary. Plot he dismisses as unnecessary-unless your reader is slow and uninterested in real fiction. The novel does not have plot, he implies; it does something much more important. Yet he can't really express what this is without resorting to academic jargon and self-consciously pretty writing: "And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere." I have a mental picture of Mr. Wood reading that sentence out loud and kissing his fingers like a chef: What a beautiful sentence! (Maybe, but what does it mean?)

And talk about a gratuitous slap: when David "sees Bathsheba," Wood writes (on the way to analysing David's character as one who "sees, and acts...[a]s far as the narrative is concerned, he does not think"), "what happens to him is not an idea, or at least not in the way that Jesus, that cheerless psychologist, meant when he said that for a man to look lustfully upon a woman is already to commit adultery."

"Cheerless psychologist," huh? What pithiness, what cutting insight. (That is sarcasm.)

But there it is. He is flip, self-satisfied, self-absorbed. He is uninterested in the entire novel, obsessed instead with single phrases and turns, with minor effects and details. He scorns plot as "essentially juvenile" but leaves us with vagueness about what the novel should be doing instead. (Apparently "subtle analysis of character" is important, but he doesn't make clear what this is.) Buy The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist by Thomas McCormick instead.

A disappointment. Based on a few print reviews I was expecting something really terrific, and there are four or five nicely turned passages here. But Mr. Wood has a terribly narrow sense of what makes fiction worthwhile, and seems to have no feeling at all for the pleasures of plot or the music of contemporary language. For him it all comes down to the gentlemanly delectation of "fine moments" in novels. One could forgive him this fussiness if it were done exceptionally well, but in fact this book is a kind of inflated pamphlet, with huge margins and large print, which simply strings together some ideas about narration and character. It is a real step down from a delightful book I first read at college in the 1960s and have returned to several times since: Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, which I'm happy to see is still in print. It is really scandalous that Mr. Wood didn't see fit to mention this forebear from which he borrows so much.

James Wood's book is largely an engaging read filled with pleasing sentences and often telling illustration. It deals principally with writerly skills, and those particular uses of them which make in novels for the Beautiful. Among the most important of these is the indirect or ironic narrative style whose virtues Wood demonstrates in detail. The author in similar fashion moves on to treat with equivalent freshness such expected areas as characterization and language. Then, toward the end of the book, he turns to the question of the True in novels, and persuasively argues for what he calls "lifeness." Such concerns of Beauty and Truth are of obvious centrality to both the creative writer and the appreciative reader of novels. So far, I'd argue, so good.

The book finally and sadly disappoints, however, and it does so owing to the author's inadequate and stale, if still widely fashionable view of what in novels constitutes the third element in Plato's trinity, the Good. About the freshest Wood gets in his noticeably scant treatment of this topic is a twice repeated quotation from George Eliot on how novel reading can expand our sympathies, enlarge our human capacities and horizons. Surely this is true as far as it goes, but Wood implies much more here which he doesn't seem to realize is highly questionable. If I read him rightly, he is praising readers of novels who leave Plato's Cave in order just to become "non-judgmental" multiculturalists, open to all times, places, and persons. And this assumption, held apparently with uncritical dogmatism, is as far as Wood goes in considering the Good.

Wood's thinking, despite his own early voiced Joycean fear of pedantry, finally itself smells too much of the shop. He values the difficulty of the doing almost to the exclusion of the human worth of the thing done. His enthusiasm, for example, for the artistry in a particularly gross passage from Philip Roth coupled with an ignoring of any deeper moral considerations may stand as the signature of Wood's strengths and weaknesses as a critic. What he omits in bowing before the artistry of any skillful wielder of words is what Flannery O'Connor included when she quipped that for Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" adultery was a sin whereas for rootless postmodern fiction writers, critics, and readers it is at most "an inconvenience."

Flannery O'Connor, by the way, whose own brilliant book of criticism "Mystery and Manners" Wood oddly neglects, shared with Plato and Tolstoy the belief that art was so powerful a force, it could be dangerous, to the artist and to society. On the other hand, PBS a few years ago inadvertently revealed its cruder idea that art in our time had at last been defanged and was instead now happily insipid, the station even going so far as to offer subscribers a self-congratulatory button sporting the phrase "Fear No Art." In his inadequate handling of the "Good" in the art of the novel, James Wood for all his sophistication places himself, I'm afraid, on PBS' side of the court.

This book works for me on many levels.

It was great fun to read the many thoughtful reviews and comments here on Amazon. I found the Reviews of Charlus, Stanley H. Nemeth and madman particularly thoughtful and insightful; I found the Comments of Doug - Haydn Fan', especially Doug - Haydn Fan, The Ghost of M, Thomas Plotkin, and Stanley Nemeth first rate. Literary fireworks of the first order, all engendered by Wood's little volume, and I enjoyed the show very much.

A similar collection of reactions -- less erudite in general -- appeared in "The New York Times Book Review" for August 31. It's fascinating that a major critic can engender so much passion and so much learning, all at the same time.

Wood helps me deepen my understanding, appreciation and pleasure in reading great fiction. Five years ago Edith Grossman released a wonderful translation of Don Quixote. After reading Wood's review in "The New Yorker", I re-read Cervantes's great work with deeper pleasure. "[I]t is worth reminding ourselves of the gross, the worldly, the violent, and, above all, the comic in "Don Quixote"--worth reminding ourselves that we are permitted the odd secular guffaw while reading it. If all of modern fiction comes out of the Knight's cape, one reason might be that Cervantes's novel contains the major comic tropes, from the farcical to the delicately ironic." Comment 1, fn 1.

Wood infuriates me, and teaches me. He analyzes an essay by Orwell in which a condemned man avoids a puddle on the way to his execution. "There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit."

But wait a minute: could the condemned man have been saving his shoes for another inmate? Perhaps he was a Buddist avoiding killing a living thing hidden in the puddle; the Life of Pi teaches us that practicing religion at the end of our lives may help us avoid missing "a better story". Perhaps the prisoner hoped for a pardon? Was his avoidance similar to Commander Scobee's last recorded act pressing the communication button on Challenger? Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin describes two deaths in moments. Johnson, according to Boswell, thought hanging "concentrates [one's] mind wonderfully." Was that prisoner's act truly "a margin of surplus".

The previous paragraph is my pale imitation of one of Wood's often repeated effects; as Kirn describes it in the "Times" review: "He drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed." [Footnote 2.]

Wood's references compliment me when I am reminded of remembered reading. They challenge me when I know most, but not all of the references, and inspire me to search out the gaps in my learning. They irritate and intimidate me when I don't know any of the references at all.

Wood's book provides a good index and a very useful chronology of his major references. His book would have been greatly improved for me if he had provided a glossary of terms -- I'm not sure exactly what he means by Modern and Post-Modern fiction, and not at all sure what fiction preceded Modern fiction. What exactly is "lifeness" -- and how can "fiction" be imbued with "lifeness"? -- at one level they seem to be contradictory ideas. Is "lifeness" different from "the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiry."

I would also have liked a glossary because his terms collapse into each other: "when I talk about free indirect style, I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real ...." I'm not sure I understand the margins of the these words and phrases and others he uses throughout his book.

The search function here on Amazon helps a bit -- I don't footnote Wood's words in this Review because one can search for his words there -- but this is one book where Kindle would come in very handy with book in hand. To really understand Wood, I need to re-read Madame Bovary (the Wall translation), and Wood has inspired me to read A House for Mr. Biswas for the first time. A Kindle at my side with Wood on board would enhance both journeys.

At the end of the day, though, I wonder if I'm really the "common reader" Wood is speaking to; should a "common reader" need these aids when Wood has "tried to reduce what Joyce calls 'the true scholastic stink' to bearable levels." In a discussion of dislikeable characters, Wood writes: "A glance at the thousands of foolish 'reader reviews' on Amazon.com, with their complaints about 'dislikeable charcters,' confirms a contagion of moralizing niceness."

Wood took a similar whack at Amazon reviewers and also at reading groups in an article in "The Guardian" earlier this year:

'But a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow'"."

As a Reviewer here on Amazon and as a member of a couple of book clubs, I may not be Wood's "common reader". I might be better off reading some of interesting alternative texts suggested by Wood and the Amazon folks in the reviews and comments here: Viktor Shklovsky, Roland Barthes, Percey Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, "discussing the symbolists", C.S. Lewis for "telling and exact readings of writing and especially the art of storytelling", Nabokov "especially on Gogol" and his memoir, Speak, Memory, Flannery O'Connor in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, and even the "Glenn Gould Reader" on why Gould didn't like Mozart as much he liked Bach: "it was aesthetics and not mere taste."

Despite my doubts and some excellent alternatives, I'll undoubtedly continue to follow Wood's work as well, with pleasure and perhaps with a Kindle at hand. I'm sure I'll deepen my enjoyment of fiction.

Robert C. Ross 2008


Addendum: I wonder if Wood's attack on "silly" Amazon reviews and book clubs might have been in response to attacks on The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud, Wood's wife. The most negative review at the moment is by D. West "Bones", who writes: "In my opinion, none of the main characters are anywhere near as adorable as the author keeps insisting they are. Their most notable characteristic is a non-stop (and rather interchangeable) flow of campy repartee that might convey intellect, success, pretension, heartbreak, or whatever to someone steeped in their milieu but which kept me at a considerable emotional distance." D. West offers her copy of the book free to the reader, as does a the writer of a Comment, who offers up the eight copies from her book club. B.

I have to chime in and agree with the reviews saying this book is rather slight; calling it a book is almost an act of nerve. But size isn't everything, and the more important question is, how good is it? Well, there are bits that are interesting, but for the most part this reads like an introductory lecture for a community college class on fiction, and a rather sketchy introductory lecture at that. The points the author makes are generally fairly obvious, and even if they aren't when you start this book, by the time you finish you will be able to predict where he's going easily. Basically, he talks about how the tone or voice of a novel is affected by techniques in narration, dialogue, structure, etc. Only in the last chapter, when he rises above his own discussion to give what you might call the meta-discussion--how both great and mediocre fiction can have all these elements he's just discussed for the past 200 pages, but it's *how you employ them that counts*--does the book start to get interesting. But after ten pages this chapter is over, the book is finished, and you're left checking the binding to see if the second half accidentally fell out. Just when he gets going saying something worth the obscene purchase price of the book, he ends it. Not worth it, even if you're a "middle brow" reader as some reviewers have pegged the book and its intended readership. You can be middle brown and do better than this. Early on, the author references Milan Kundera's book The Art of the Novel, and praises it but says it comes up short on concrete examples. While that may be true, Kundera is, intellectually and in terms of insight and revelation, light-years ahead of this book.

I had hoped to learn from this book how to read and write fiction better. This is not a good reason to read this book. I learned little. The book is a defense of common literary realism against the attacks of avant garde experimentalists. Wood defends it by interpreting examples drawn from classic traditional novels (Flaubert, Tolstoy,... Bellow, Updike). I found his examples well chosen and expertly interpreted, but if you already understand that good writing involves narration, telling details, vivid characters, sympathy for characters different from you, language that is powerful, economical, and musical, and that literature should give delight as well as truth, you won't learn much. You'll find some great illustrations of writers accomplishing these things well, but if you read fiction, you'll already have your own examples.

The title attracted my attention: I know what I like when I read it, but I don't always stop to analyse how it works, or even why. I also wondered, as I made a decision to read, whether a book of less than 300 pages could address this to my satisfaction.

I found the book interesting. Far from attempting definitive answers, Professor Wood poses a set of questions to consider as part of critical reading. Consider the following:
`What do we mean when we say we `know' a fictional character?'
`What constitutes a `telling' detail?'
`When is a metaphor successful?'
`Why do most endings of novels disappoint?'

Professor Wood covers the narrative and style of a range of different authors, including Homer, Austen, Woolf, Bellow, Beatrix Potter, Coetzee, Le Carre and Pynchon.

For me, this book is a starting point rather than a destination. I enjoyed the writing, didn't always share the conclusions and would like to consider further some of the other forms of fiction apart from novels.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

'How Fiction Works' is a reasoned approach, element by element, to Mr. Wood's ideas of *why* successful literature is effective. This is theory, but not so technical that readers unfamiliar with literary criticism (like me) will feel out of their depths. In fact, Mr. Wood's style and arguments are not unfairly complex, and those who would be interested in this kind of critique should have little trouble grasping his concepts.

That isn't to say that it's a cursory examination. Though quite short, the author roots around in literature's history and plucks out gems from Flaubert, Bellow, and Dostoyevsky among others, for exemplary illustrations of:

-The difference between detail that is merely place setting, detail that inhabits the object described, and detail that sells the story (Thisness),
-What's really real (lifeness),
-Going beyond Point of View and into Free Indirect Style, and how even the masters overwrite,
-And a rebuttal to E.M. Forster, in Forster's 'The Aspect of the Novel', of the idea of round and flat characters, along with other notes on dialogue, language and "A Brief History of Consciousness".

If Mr. Wood, in his (mostly) earnest and guiding style, had limited himself to these discussions, then I think the book's success (regardless if I agree with every idea) would be assured. What is frankly bewildering to me is the inclusion of Mr. Wood's short, throwaway asides concerning religion.

Mr. Wood establishes his opinion quickly - in the second paragraph of the book, he quotes Phillip Larkin (religion as "That vast musical moth-eaten brocade") when asserting that both religion and the eighteenth century's stylistic tendency toward 'authorial omniscience' have "had (their) day". If the goal had been to use the Larkin quote as an example of detail, or of style, then fair enough - but it is there solely to accompany a dusty, outdated convention in order to amplify and enhance it. Ironic comparison, I suppose, if you feel the way Mr. Wood does about religion. Insulting if not.

Then, on page 143, as Mr. Wood opts to refer to Jesus Christ as "that cheerless psychologist", it dawns on me that he may have a separate point other than literary criticism he is advocating. I would never deny him that opportunity, and if I had bought the book "How I think Christianity is Slightly Ridiculous" by James Wood, then I would expect such commentary. But this is "How Fiction Works", and it is a testament to the power of his irrelevant asides that I remember them as well as his theoretical statements.

Perhaps it is a leap, but I can't help connect my inferred views of Mr. Wood's take on religion with his overly simplistic critique of the "contagion of moralizing niceness" permeating modern reviews which denounce a work because of its unlikable characters. Mr. Wood posits that unlikable characters, even monstrous ones, are justified in artistic works to explore that facet of humanity. I agree. I think it is *absolutely* justified, but to make general statements implying that those who dislike a book's characters are somehow too ignorant (or too timid) to discern the book's artistic merit is nonsense. The insinuation is that I should somehow sublimate my moral repugnance and celebrate the artist regardless - which I will not do until I've satisfied for myself what the author's intent is. Is he advocating such behavior or examining it? The difference is critical. Even in the example Mr. Wood provides, a film review in the NY Times, the review's author felt as though the authors of the film "seem to want us to sympathize with, even applaud," lecherous behavior. That is acutely different from simply 'disliking' the film's characters. Mr. Wood believes that "A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction" - and in this regard, I think he should have taken his own implied advice.

What other proof does Mr. Wood's offer for this plague of moralizing niceness? The Times review, and "A glance at the thousands of foolish 'reader reviews' on Amazon.com, with their complaints about 'dislikable characters'" It is telling that he chose to include the word 'foolish' in his assertion. Without it, the idea remains essentially the same. With it, he condemns the whole Amazon review system. I find it puzzling that hobby reviewers are so frightening to noted critics such as James Wood and Cynthia Ozick - so much so that they make a special effort to discredit us.

It is entirely possible that I've parsed his words to finely, or am too sensitive to these issues, but I find it hard to recommend a book that, in what could have been an educative and enjoyable experience, instead uses its main subject as a cover for (not so) veiled insults. The larger question is why someone would feel it necessary to include inflammatory remarks in a book on literary theory at all. A critic who makes his living analyzing words surely knew what effect his own could have - which, to me, removed the complexity of literary theory from the forefront of the book and instituted James Wood's opinions as the subject. Retailing at 14 dollars on the bookshelf, that makes it 13 dollars and 98 cents too much.

Points in this book's favor -

It's short, and very readable. In the introduction, Wood promises to be "mindful of the common reader" and to try to "reduce .. the scholastic stink to bearable levels". He does a commendable job of keeping his promise.

Wood's enthusiasm for reading is evident throughout, and is infectious. The strongest aspect of the book are the many specific examples that Wood provides of what works and doesn't work in fiction. Refreshingly, the ratio of positive to negative examples is high, so that we are treated to eloquence inspired by enthusiasm, rather than critical disregard, for the most part. His insights on Chekhov, Joyce, Nabokov (to name just a few) prompt me to go back and (re)read the work in question.

On the other hand:

Although I didn't find Wood's style overtly pompous, there is an inescapable sense that one is reading dispatches from what Walter Kirn, in his wicked New York Times review, refers to as "someone who has attained the detached, big-picture perspective of an orbiting critical satellite". In other words, a slightly offputting air of detached omniscience - that one is reading tablets handed down from the mountain.

Wood displays an enthusiasm for Flaubert (and, to a lesser extent, Henry James) that borders on burbling adulation. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but when coupled with what appears to be a blanket dislike for almost everything even remotely postmodern, one begins to feel that Wood might be a helpful guide only for a certain subclass of fiction. David Foster Wallace, for example, gets dissed several times throughout the book, with little recognition of his considerable talent and influence. Of the 90 or so works referred to in the book, only 20 date from 1965 or later; 21st century fiction is clearly not where Wood's primary interest lies.

On balance, though, I very much enjoyed the book. Wood's discussion of such topics as narrative voice, effective characterization, use of detail, convincing dialog, and "realism" is generally clear and thought-provoking. For a middlebrow reader like me, this book is likely to be helpful.

A perfectly valid, and thoroughly amusing, view to the contrary is contained in Walter Kirn's New York Times review at the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/books/review/Kirn-t.html