Review by New York Times Review
In the second of two short prefaces to "How Fiction Works," an old-fashioned primer on literature that also functions as a timely primer on the art of modest self-marketing, the esteemed critic James Wood reaches out to assure "the common reader" (that good fellow from the club who tries to keep up with all things cultural but is forever slightly short on time) that his prose is as free as he can make it of what James Joyce termed "the true scholastic stink" of so much academic writing. After noting his intellectual debts to "the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky" and "the French formalist-cumstructuralist Roland Barthes," Wood goes on to compare his "little volume" to the Victorian critic John Ruskin's musings on the Renaissance painter Tintoretto. Finally, to make himself even less intimidating, even more approachable, Wood (who writes these days for The New Yorker) has us know that every passage he cites in demonstration of his theories comes from "the books at hand in my study" rather than, as the common reader might fear, the entire New York Public Library or, even more distressing, his memory. Wood's study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by the inarguable erudition displayed in his compact vade mecum of short chapters and neatly numbered sections devoted to such topics as point of view, characterization, fictional detail and, toward the end, nothing less than "A Brief History of Consciousness." He drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed. "In Book 22 of the 'Iliad,'" Wood writes in a discussion of wrinkles in narrative time, "Hector's wife is at home warming his bath though he has in fact died moments before; Auden praised Bruegel, in 'Musée des Beaux Arts,' for noticing that, while Icarus fell, a ship was calmly moving on through the waves, unnoticing. In the Dunkirk section of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' the protagonist, a British soldier retreating through chaos and death toward Dunkirk, sees a barge going by." With the whole Western canon at his disposal, apparently, Wood begins to shape a general argument whose moderate, neoclassical simplicity and preference for precision and clarity over mere vigor and potency seem initially like the hard-nosed wisdom of someone who's read a million pages, seen all writerly tricks a thousand times and attained the detached, big-picture perspective of an orbiting critical satellite. His essential point is this: Novels and short stories succeed or fail according to their capacity (a capacity that has progressed over the centuries rather like the march of science) to represent, affectingly and credibly, the actual workings of the human mind as it interacts with the real world. The mind and the world, as Wood defines them, are dependable, fixed phenomena, for the most part, possessed of natural, intrinsic qualities that fiction writers in their ink-stained lab coats measure, prod, explore and seek to illustrate using a rather limited range of instruments that can be endlessly adjusted. The role of these researchers' prejudices and passions - as well as that of their social, psychological, geographic and spiritual circumstances - is barely credited by Wood. The heroes of this great artistic labor tend to be semimonastic introverts who, like Wood's beloved Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, toil with the doors shut and locked, in soundproof splendid isolation, attentive to the subtle frictions among nouns and adjectival phrases. Conversely, the folks who spoil the experiment are David Foster Wallace types who let themselves be distracted and overwhelmed by the roar of the streets, the voices of the crowd. Wallace, to whom Wood grants the dubious honor of being one of his book's few aesthetic villains, is accused of "obliterating" his characters' voices in an unpleasing, "hideously ugly" attempt to channel cultural chaos rather than filter, manipulate or muffle it. For the vicarish Wood, sequestered in his chamber, part of the fiction writer's true vocation appears to be acoustic regulation - the engineering of a mental space in which literary whispers can be heard. The grosser elements of fiction - story, plot and setting, as well as the powerful drive of certain authors to expand or alter perception by exalting the vernacular, absorbing the anarchic and ennobling the vulgar that has impelled such messy masterworks as "Huckleberry Finn," "On the Road" and Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son" - intrude not at all on Wood's presentation, which proceeds in the steady, dark-gowned, unruffled manner of a high-court judge. Wood seems firm in his conviction that accounting for How Fiction Works needn't involve bewildering digressions into Why Writers Write or Why Readers Read. For him, that matter seems settled. They do it to perfect the union of Wood's vaunted "artifice and verisimilitude," two virtues he treats as though carved on a stone tablet, and thereby to promote the cause of civilization; not, as is so frequently the case outside the leathery environs of the private library, to escape the constrictions of civilization, redraw its boundaries, decalcify its customs, or revive the writer's or reader's own spirits by dancing on its debris. THOUGH Wood's precise, dialectical approach is well adapted to tracing the paradoxes behind standard literary conventions ("Actually, first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable; and third-person 'omniscient' narration is generally more partial than omniscient"), and while he makes many nuanced observations about the fetishes and habits that mark individual writers' styles ("Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself," "This roughened-up texture and rhythm is, for me at least, one of the reasons that I rarely find Bellow an intrusive lyricist"), he winds up restating more of what we do know than exposing what we don't, quite. Take his disquisition on detail, which comes down first to asserting its importance, then to questioning its all-importance, and then, after serving up a list of some of his very favorite fictional details, to defining the apt, exquisite detail much as a judge once defined obscenity: as something he knows when he sees it. He operates similarly in his discussions of verbal musicality and the craft of proper word choice, implying that his knowing and his seeing are of a peculiarly high degree and ought to prove persuasive and sufficient simply because he's known and seen so much. Having been lashed by twice as many citations as even a formalist-cumstructuralist should require, and having been incrementally diminished by Wood's tone of genteel condescension (he flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic), the common reader is likely to concede virtually anything the master wishes - except, perhaps, his precious time. For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible prose style of his donnish, finicky persona. "How Fiction Works" is a definitive title, promising much and presuming even more: that anyone, in the age of made-up memoirs and so-called novels whose protagonists share their authors' biographies and names, still knows what fiction is; that those who do know agree that it resembles a machine or a device, not a mess, a mystery or a miracle; and that once we know how fiction works, we'll still care about it as an art form rather than merely admire it as an exercise. But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap. Wood drops his quotations and references as freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering birdseed. Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His latest novel is "The Unbinding."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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 melange"), 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
What does it take to write the next great American novel? Novelist/critic Wood should know. What starts out as merely numbered statements (123 in total) about everything from creating fictional characters to developing dialog ultimately emerges as both a novelist's manifesto and a witty history of the novel. (LJ 5/15/08) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
New Yorker staff writer Wood (Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, 2004, etc.) channels E.M. Forster's classic Aspects of the Novel in a book-length analysis of the techniques that make fiction "both artifice and verisimilitude." Adopting an enthusiast's approach, the author examines classic and contemporary aesthetic choices, citing the works of several dozen favorite authors, including precursors of fiction (Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes), consensus masters (Flaubert, Tolstoy, Austen, Henry James, Chekhov, Stendhal) and eminences still practicing (V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, Jos Saramago, Ian McEwan). Wood occasionally gushes, as in his consideration of "free indirect style ... [which allows us to] see things though ...the character's eyes and language but also through the author's." But he quickly composes himself, rebuking John Updike and Saul Bellow for allowing authorial mind-sets to infiltrate a character's habits of thinking and speaking (in the former's Terrorist and the latter's Seize the Day). There follows a superb discussion of "Real and Literary Detail," emphasizing "the moment when a single detail has suddenly enabled us to see a character's thinking." The centrality of characterization in the modern novel is linked to the interest of certain masters (notably Dostoevsky) in making psychological complexity dramatically interesting. In a parallel argument, Wood examines how rhythm and momentum are established through the skillful manipulation of simple everyday language (as in the best of D.H. Lawrence). Wood's unalloyed delight in the achievements of the finest writers of fiction leads him to a closely reasoned and impassioned rejection of the ignorant canard claiming that realistic fiction is dead. Highly stimulating stuff--if it doesn't make you hug your bookcase gratefully, you're probably an incorrigible "formalist-cum-structuralist." Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
