By: James Wood Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 288 Publication Date: July 22, 2008 Release Date: July 22, 2008
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.
Amazon.com: Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: The first thing you'll notice about How Fiction Works is its size. At 252 pages, it's a marvel of economy for a book that asks such a huge question and right away you'll want to know (as you might at the start of a new novel) what the author has in store. James Wood takes only his own bookshelves as his literary terrain for this study, and that in itself is the most delightful gift: he joins his audience as a reader, citing his chosen texts judiciously--ranging from Henry James (from whom he takes the best epigraph to a book I've ever read) to Nabokov, Joyce, Updike, and more--to explore not just how fiction works, mechanically speaking, but to reflect on how a novelist's choices make us feel that a novel ultimately works ... or doesn't. Wood remarks that you have to "read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it." His terrific bibliography will surely be a boon to anyone's education, but it's his masterful writing that you'll want to keep reading over the course of your life. --Anne Bartholomew
Best book on writing fiction ever. I learnt more about reading and writing fiction from this little wonder than anything else. Its also an opinionated, amusing joy to read. I leant it to a freind who loves it to, but I cant wait to get it back again.
The Practice of Criticsm 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 more recently, something like Kieron Smith, Boy in which James Kelman tries to be the ventriloquist of a boy from working class Glasgow. But such a project is always beset by a bit of a ruse. After all, how likely is it that a tough young Glaswegian is going to take the time to pen a 432 page memoir, even if it is in the dialect that Kelman seeks to reproduce?
Wood is out to explain how fiction works, not in order to provide a template for would-be writers to go enact a formula, but more for readers who appreciate good criticism as a portal into the further enchanting mysteries of fiction (as when we ask ourselves sometimes, "Now, just how does this paper-and-ink artifact manage to do this to me?"). While Wood tips his hat to Barthes, this is not a "theory-driven" account of literature. Indeed, there is something kind of "lunch box"--or rather, "tool box"--about it in its meat-and-potatoes attention to the basic elements of narration, detail, character, language, register, and dialogue (ending with a short theoretical riff on one of Wood's enduring interests: the question of realism).
The range of Woods' interlocutors is almost dizzying (from Homer to Cormac McCarthy), but a couple of heroes keep asserting themselves: Flaubert and Henry James, even thought both were prone to what Wood sees as the persistent temptation of the modern novel--an aestheticist wallowing in detail (see Updike). But Flaubert and James are simply the leading voices of a rich choir that Wood orchestrates, with parts for Cervantes and Defoe as well as Pynchon and Delillo.
It's on this point that I would register one criticism. In what is, without question, a landmark book that I have already profited from quite immeasurably, I do find Wood sometimes wears his learning a little heavily. To be more precise, there are times when he slides from being precocious to being just rather obnoxious. Take, for instance, an opening "Note on Footnotes and Dates" in which Wood feels it necessary to point out that "I have used only the books that I actually own--the books at hand in my study--to produce this little volume." Why tell us that? Perhaps to deflect critics who will decry books that have been ignored--though, in that case, the criticism would still hold, wouldn't it? For instance, one can imagine politically correct assistant professors of English lamenting the "Eurocentric" nature of Wood's book ("Where is the Indonesian, post-colonial fiction?!") and thus Wood trying to head them off at the pass by saying, "Look, I was just working with what I had to hand." But then the criticism would be: "Not only is this 'little book' Eurocentrist and still-colonial, but James Wood is! He doesn't have any Indonesian, post-colonial fiction in his personal library!"
Instead, what is intended as a mark of humble constraints (in producing "this little volume") comes off as backhanded pomposity. This is augmented by the function of several of the scant footnotes in the text which seem like little more than Wood showing off. These includes little asides which catalogue instances of self-plagiarism in Tolstoy, Dickens, James and McCarthy (p. 65); or the convention of allegorical names in Tolstoy, Thackeray, Wordsworth, and Evelyn Waugh (p. 115); or the cast of minor characters with writers' names in Proust, Bernanos, Updike, Jones, Tolstoy (again!), and others (p. 162). Methinks Wood doth indulge a bit. (Read: fat ankles!)
Finally, let me take up one particular piece of criticism in which Wood, contrary to his otherwise exemplary practice, seems to miss the point precisely because he fails to appreciate a theological point in literature. (In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Wood has shown his superiority to a critic like Christopher Hitchens precisely in his ability to appreciate theological nuance.) The context is his marvelous discussion of free indirect style. Not surprisingly, he holds up Henry James' What Maisie Knew as a model. Though told from the third person, Wood notes how James' manages to make the narrative bend to the voice and world of young Maisie Farange, who is bounced between her divorced parents and attaches herself to one of her governesses, Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Wix had a daughter, Clara Matilda, who died tragically just when she was about Maisie's age, and Maisie often accompanies Mrs. Wix to Clara's grave in the cemetary at Kensal Green. Wood wants us to focus on James' ability to write from the third person in a way that invites us to inhabit young Maisie's confusion, torn between her mother (who speaks poorly of the lowly Mrs. Wix) and the governess, but also confused by the absence of Clara Matilda. He hones in on this passage:
Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven and yet, embarrasingly, also in Kensal Green, where they had been together to see her little huddled grave.
Wood suggests that "James's genius gathers in one word: 'embarrasingly.'" Whose word is "embarrasingly," he asks? "It is Maisie's: it is embarrassing for a child to witness adult grief, and we know that Mrs. Wix has taken to referring to Clara Matilda as Maisie's 'little dead sister.'" Wood is exactly right that "embarrasingly" is Maisie's language, and thus rightly notes James' ability to bend the narrative--even in the third person--to Maisie's world so that we hear Maisie and not (just) James. But Wood seems to completely misinterpret just what is "embarrassing" for Maisie. It is not witnessing Mrs. Wix's grief. It is, rather, the theological tension that even young Maisie experiences: how can Clara Matilda be in heaven and in Kensal Green? Wood seems to completely miss the also in the passage. It is the conjunction that is the cause of embarrassment.
These minor criticisms aside, How Fiction Works leaves one eager to read anew.
big ideas, cramped library? Beautiful writing and sharp insights throughout. The Wood Channel could do for literature what ESPN did for sports if Wood would sacrifice a bit his devotion to The Canon. This turns out to be the conceit of selecting books only from his library. Its admission standards start to feel claustrophobic after a while. Flaubert and H. James admirers will find endless refreshment from these pages. If you hated Madame Bovary and couldn't lift up Dostoevsky long enough to get from Raskolnikov's crime to his punishment, you will find yourself searching in vain for a wider selection of stories, authors, and techniques. Wood turns messy received literary tradition into fresh, exciting, and understandable language. He's the Constance Garnett for the rest of us. But his inattention to more unorthodox fictional workings might leave some literary X Games enthusiasts hungry for more.
A personal and practical approach to a master critic 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.
Must I care How Fiction Works? Several comments leave an impression to at least one not academically qualified to have wandered into a symposium for MBA/PhD credentialed professionals.
Give classicists their due in literary art forms, this common reader also enjoys contemporaries, such as David Guterson's introspective The Other, circa 2008.
I don't care How Fiction Works, as long as a story works for me, written then or now.
Anything Goes Trivia
Last Kiss
Megaton Man
Trevor
