How Fiction Works

From the Publisher

"How Fiction Works should delight and enlighten practicing novelists, would-be novelists, and all passionate readers of fiction. . . . Enchanting."--The Economist

"Wood's enthusiasm is glorious . . . a delight. . . . The pleasure in this book lies in watching Wood read."—Time

"An articulate reminder of the framework that is essential to constructing a lasting work of the imagination."—The Miami Herald

"Wood is among the few contemporary writers of great consequence. . . . Reading Wood, no matter the book under review, provides enormous pleasure."—Los Angeles Times

"A fiercely committed critic and consummate stylist."—John Banville, The New York Review of Books

"A perceptive and graceful essay which almost anybody who's interested in books could read . . . Well worth reading."—The Sunday Times (UK)

Christopher Tilghman

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.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Wood takes aim at E.M. Forster's longtime standard-bearer Aspects of the Novelin 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 Theateras "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 Yorkerand 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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Library Journal

Serious readers of fiction will tackle this informing and enlightening new work with unrestrained relish. A staff writer at The New Yorker, Wood (American literature, Harvard Univ.; The Book Against God) asks all the right questions: What is character, point of view, the value of metaphor and simile, and detail? Is it all artifice or realism, or could it be labeled imaginative truth? His engaging discussion covers narration in all its forms, the impersonal author, the tension that exists between an author's and a character's style, flat vs. round characters, irony, and more. Wood uses excerpts from works by notable authors, from Miguel Cervantes and Jane Austen to Saul Bellow and John Updike, to illustrate his statements with pinpoint precision. Whether he is commenting on a work's weakness or strength, he supports his opinion with reasoned scholarship. Great fiction has what Wood calls "lifeness." Ditto for this book, whose footnotes are as engrossing as the narrative. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries.
—Robert Kelly

Kirkus Reviews

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, Jose 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 ignorantcanard 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."

The Barnes & Noble Review

At its modest best, James Wood's first book-length study reasserts an idea that most average readers already assume: that literature is a reflection and imitation of reality, that art connects us to the world, and that style serves as our best measure of that connection. Of course, literary academics, for the most part, deny most of these once commonplace notions. And Wood -- one of the most celebrated and controversial writers on fiction currently working -- isn't exactly sure who his audience is for this otherwise sensible and cleanly written meditation. Make no mistake: far from a how-to or beginner's guide to fiction, this collection of 123 little pieces ranges from instructive anecdotes to head-on engagements with some heavyweight critical theorists. This impressive range produces its own drawback -- Wood maintains multiple levels of diction that will confuse those expecting the graceful style on display in so many of his much-admired essays.

Wood begins on steady ground, asking the basic, admittedly "old" questions about the art of fiction: "Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character? When do we recognize a brilliant use of detail in fiction? What is point of view, and how does it work? What is imaginative sympathy? Why does fiction move us?" Despite some meanderings, Wood addresses all these issues with explanations that nicely popularize the more academic responses of sympathetic scholars such as Wayne Booth, Erich Auerbach, and Gerald Graff, none of whom are cited in this often idiosyncratic book. Wood prefers to deal with two of his "favorite twentieth-century critics of the novel": the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, and the French structuralist Roland Barthes, both of whom Wood considers "wrong-headed."

So why the extended discussion of Barthes? For one thing, he provides a solid statement of the popular notion (among postmodern theorists) that literature has no relation to an external reality, that the text is just that, words on a page, a world unto itself. Wood admires Barthes's interest in style, and it's true that the French critic's essays display a virtuosity absent from the work of his deconstructionist compatriots. He writes wonderfully on everything from St. Ignatius to food magazines. But Barthes's view of literary narrative is anti-realist to its core: nothing "happens" in a novel except the language in that novel, which refers to nothing outside itself. This runs counter to everything Wood rightly believes. In his view, Barthes (along with writers as diverse as William Gass, Rick Moody, and Patrick Giles) considers artifice and convention in fictional narratives to be proof that realism is impossible. Wood counters simply that neither renders fiction untruthful, and that we need more elastic and nuanced views of what constitutes the reality being depicted.

And here, in a way, is the trouble with Wood's constant references to "life" and "truth" throughout these blog-like entries. While he admits that the notion of a stable, shared truth begins to erode in the 19th century, he seems to rely on transcendent notions of both in the present. That's not a bad thing, since common readers are likely to agree. We read and measure what we read by our everyday sense of the world around us, and Wood does too. He cites Aristotle, Samuel Johnson, and George Eliot to the effect that (in Eliot's words) "[a]rt is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot." But Wood wants to satisfy the theorists among his readers as well, and that's where his failure to enlist critics such as Booth, Graff, or even Lionel Trilling make his calls for "lifeness" in fiction -- to see things as they are in the world -- ring hollow.

Fortunately, there's more to this book than theoretical concerns. Wood is at his finest when discussing actual snippets of fiction (and also some bits of plays, poems, movies, and TV shows). His examples draw widely from the canon: Tolstoy, Stendhal, Proust, Mann, James, Woolf, Naipaul, Bellow, and, most extensively, Flaubert, the master stylist, famous for the agonizing care with which he wrote. It was Flaubert, after all, who rejected earlier notions of a directly realistic style, with its more arbitrary concern for detail. The key to modern narrative, in Wood's view, is the "free indirect style" that floats away from a controlling author or a first-person narrator and seems to attach to characters. In modern fiction, we need to ask, who is the controlling consciousness of the prose? Or as Wood puts it, who "owns the words"? And he considers passages from Henry James and John Updike that demonstrate how an author relates to his characters. In Updike's case, in The Terrorist, overwrought prose often gets between us and his simple characters, while in James's What Maisie Knew, the author seems to disappear, allowing us to experience the fictional reality unimpeded.

Wood further shines in his discussions of novelistic detail and language; his own formalist tendencies serve him well. His riff on the line "The day waves yellow with all its crops" from Woolf's The Waves will remind readers of Wood's critical essays -- it's a highly personal response grounded in his sense of the real world, and enhanced by beautiful prose of his own. Despite the simplicity of the line, Wood discerns "a yellow semaphore, a sea of moving color" and ends with: "[Y]ellowness has conquered our agency. How do we wave? We wave yellow. That is all we can do. The sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of will. Eight simple words evoke color, high summer, warm lethargy, ripeness." With theory out of the way, Wood proves an expert reader, alert to style, nuance, and imagination

Perhaps the most useful idea readers will take from this sometimes confusing book is Wood's notion that great literature teaches us how to read it. We don't need fancy litcrit or extra-literary ideas about society to appreciate books. Style's the thing wherein an author makes clear his meanings and intentions, from who's speaking to the moral issues at play in the work. Style determines the details that are relevant and the revelation of character, and it controls our sympathies. Wood's style here, or I should say "styles," range high and low -- he can be casual to a fault, and buries some of his best apercus in footnotes. But at his best, Wood testifies to the wonder of the artistic imagination and its ability to enrich our lives. --Thomas DePietro

Thomas DePietro, a former contributing editor of Kirkus Reviews, has also published in Commonweal, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. He recently edited Conversations with Don DeLillo, and his book on Kingsley Amis is forthcoming in 2008.