How Fiction Works
by James Wood
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Book Reviews of How Fiction Works
Book Review: Not Exactly a Step-by-Step Guide
Summary: 3 Stars
"How Fiction Works" is a presuming title for a slim little book, made more conspicuous by a chapter called "A Brief History of Consciousness." Oh, is that all? But the book's author is James Wood, the New Yorker's perspicacious literary critic, and his Preface quickly allays any fears of gassy pretension or self-importance. He writes that fiction is "both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities." It's a deceptively simple thesis, and to prove it Wood picks examples from "the books at hand in my study," like a wise man plucking fruit from the tree under which he sits.
Wood claims that "Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring." Gustave Flaubert, through works like "Madame Bovary" and "A Sentimental Education," was the progenitor of the modern novelist: an `impartial,' all-seeing eye acutely sensitivity to the significance of details. Flaubert wrote that "An author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." But which details to choose? Details cannot just accrete on the page like finger grease on a handrail. A writer, unlike our "aesthetically untalented" memories, must be selective. Wood borrows from Duns Scotus, a medieval theologian, the concept of `thisness', a concreteness that lends details their correctness. He lauds the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins for the `thisness' of his details: the `lovely behaviour' of 'silk-sack clouds' in "Hurrahing in Harvest," for example.
A detail weighted with `thisness' becomes significant, perhaps symbolic. Literature is indexical, each symbol pointing to the greater truth that wraps around the glue-bound pages. Thus, Wood, concludes, the vitality of a literary character has less to do with action (or even plausibility) than with "a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's choices are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author "brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters." In this way, characters become souls instead of masks (personas), and can even seem more real than some of the one-dimensional people that we meet, characters that are fascinating and inexhaustible: Madame Bovary, Stephen Dedalus, Captain Ahab, Emma Wodehouse, Miss Jean Brodie, Sydney Carton, the Whiskey Priest, and so on...
Book Review: The Cover is the Key
Summary: 5 Stars
The retro cover says it all. Farrar, Straus knew that it had the next big thing and that the next big thing consisted of a return to the best of the past. The book is receiving a great deal of attention, confirming their prescience.
How Fiction Works is a study of something that is very old-fashioned these days: craft. It is an examination of key elements of fiction and how they are most fully utilized by skilled writers. The vast majority of the writers examined here are canonical ones--another old-fashioned touch. The book is also cognizant of the nuances of narrative history and (a more modern touch) draws on popular culture for key insights. In short, this is a delightful, perceptive "book" book. First and foremost, it is an exceptional read. It is opinionated (though not abusive or flippant) and is a nice example of something that many modern students may never have seen before--judicial criticism. Frye famously argued that judicial criticism is passé, now that we realize that literary "quality" is like the stock market. Particular authors' "stock" rises and falls, depending on generational interests, so we should not concern ourselves with evaluative judgments. That is all very nice, except for the fact that reviewers, referees, acquisition editors and agents are forced to make evaluative judgments and in a world in which 800,000 books are published annually, readers seek help and advice from putative experts.
The book takes part of its inspiration from E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, an interesting little book that has enjoyed some influence. How Fiction Works goes well beyond Forster (sometimes on issues which Forster is associated with specifically, e.g., the distinction between `flat' and `round' characters). This is a book for both critics and practitioners. It wears its erudition lightly, in the English mode, but its thoughts are often weighty and its insights acute (e.g. the notion that the French are suspicious of realism because of the function of the preterite in their language).
The book is a must read for teachers and students of narrative, both for the importance of its arguments and for its function as an exemplar of what once functioned as "criticism" and might so function once again.
Book Review: As Impenetrable as the Fiction Referenced
Summary: 2 Stars
I am one of those people who think if they buy and read enough writing self-help books, perhaps one day I will evolve to a level of confidence that I can begin putting my thoughts in coherent form on paper. For that reason I bought HOW FICTION WORKS. Perhaps this tome would be able to reveal the secret hidden from me. Had I been a PhD in literature, I might have had success. And I suppose there are those out there who will benefit from Wood's approach. I am not one of them. For me, HOW FICTION WORKS is a pedantic treatment of writing completely beyond my grasp. Wood writes, "Mindful of the common reader, I have tried to reduce what Joyce calls `the true scholastic stink' to bearable levels." He failed. Wood begins with a misguided assumption that the wide audience will share his background and familiarity with hard-to-reach literature from not only James Joyce, but Tolstoy, Humbert, Svevo, Wooster, Sebald, Dostoevsy, frequently referenced, Flaubert, and a hundred others. On occasion, he incorporates passages from important works by these giants to make a point, but more often than not he assumes you know Wooster's character Mr. Umtyfrump and how he reacted to so and so.
Without adequately describing his frame of reference, Wood assumes a knowledge base from his readers I doubt exists in all but a few percent. He jumps into esoteric literary terminology such as omniscient narration, direct speeh, free indirect speech, free indirect style, free indirect narration ... the list goes on.
I have two Bachelor's Degrees, two Master's Degrees, and some 45 years of being a "constant reader." But even I do not rise to the level of Wood's "common reader." I find high literature impenetrable. Judging by what sells well, I assume I am more common than not. So if you are an aspiring writer and Look to Stephen King or John Grisham as icons, then I don't think HOW FICTION WORKS is for you. On the other hand, if you want to better understand how Flaubert changed the fiction novel and wish to compare and contrast that to Christopher Isherwood, Cervantes, and/or Dickens, then you might enjoy it.
Book Review: Bellow's Cigar
Summary: 5 Stars
The model for this book is John Ruskin's, "The Elements of Drawing," intended as a primer to help the practicing painter, the art-lover, or curious viewer. Ruskin, a perceptive critic of painting and architecture, fostered art appreciation, but could not realistically have expected his readers to become good artists. Wood, who writes with sensitivity and wit about literature, wishes to help readers better notice what they are reading, but certainly does not expect them to become good writers. He would likely count it a hard-won success to allay a little "the contagion of moralizing niceness" that he censures in book reviewers who complain about dislikeable characters. Not to fear. The well of human tragedy never runs dry, and thankfully some writers are always drawn to it.
Writing about novelists' use of detail to describe "reality," Wood notes that literature helps us to better notice the details of life, which in turn makes us better notice details in literature, and so on. Most young readers are poor noticers. Twenty-year olds are relative virgins because they have not yet read enough literature to be taught how to read. Experience matters, whether in life, sex, reading, or writing. Nothing here suggests that reading well and closely, as hard as it is, by itself makes one a better writer. And yet, can it not be that Wood's long practice of careful reading contributes to the quality of his writing?
Wood quotes a favorite image from Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day." The detail reflects the linkage between criticism, reading and writing. Mr. Rappaport smokes a cigar. "A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency." It is one thing to appreciate the perfect, ghostly ash, another to savor the mildly narcotic smoke, and yet something else to create it - doubtless a fine, hand-rolled, Cuban. Alas, the mass-manufactured stogies are never as good.
Book Review: Obviously James Wood has never written a novel
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this book because I am in the process of writing a novel and thought it might be helpful. Uh. Wrooong. Here is my favorite sentence in the 86 pages I managed to get through: "Anyway, one can accept Barthes's stylistic proviso without accepting his epistemological caveat: fictinal reality is indeed made up of such 'effect,' but realism can be an effect and still be true." This guy (near as I was able to ascertain) was writing about using detail to show the passage of time. He attributes deep, meaningful significance to the rat-a-tat scatty groove a writer falls into while creating a sense of place and time. Why the writer said the clock faced the fireplace has almost zero meaning to the writer, but to James Wood, it is profound. No fledgling author can benefit from being coached to step back from the process, which is what Mr. Wood's book attempts to do.
I am closing this book forever at page 86 because it hasn't taught me a single thing. It hasn't opened my eyes in any way. And it certainly has no relationship to the writing process. This is a book on how to be a critic. I live in San Diego. We have a local paper called the Reader. The Reader has a film critic who is so obscure and sneeringly condescending that nobody reads his reviews except to see in what way he ripped apart a favorite film. James Wood's book reads like one of the film critic's columns from the Reader: Remote and disconnected from the topic. Plus, this book is genuinely archaic in both it's style and it's orientation to the medium. If you buy it to learn how to write you will waste your money. Buy Bird by Bird by Anne Lamontt instead. I gave this book one star because they wouldn't let me give it less. NOTE: This the only review I have ever been motivated to write.