How Fiction Works
by James Wood
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Book Reviews of How Fiction Works
Book Review: Saving the meat for last (and such a small portion)
Summary: 2 Stars
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.
Book Review: Short, Clear, Stimulating, and Entertaining
Summary: 5 Stars
The book reminds one of some of Virginia Woolf's readers. But the book is better thought out, shorter, and probably a bit more coherent than Woolf. Although saying that, Woolf's books are still outstanding reads and classics in their own way and this is not a negative comment on Woolf.
I have read the book three times and am still amused that he decides to attack amazon.com reviewers for their focus on character problems - justified or not - because amazon reviewers are far, far, below Wood in their literary sophistication.
The book is worth the price. He presents clear and impressive arguments along with historical discussions on the evolution of modern literature including Don Quixote, 1605, The King James version of the Bible, 1611, Robinson Crusoe, 1719; then, on to Fielding's Tom Jones, and the pivotal works of Diderot, Stendahl, Flaubert, and Dostoevsky. Each time I read the book I found a few gems.
As an example, I have read all of Saul Bellow's works but I gained some additional insight from his discussion of Bellow's background in poetry. There are numerous other examples including comments on Tolstoy.
Also, I liked his discussion on the evolution of the soliloquy in literature. Similarly, I enjoyed his comments on Henry James and Nabokov.
All in all it is great reading covering selected authors from Cervantes to John Updike. Wood motivates the reader to go back and look at a few old gems such as Henry James`s "What Maisie Knew."
I bought the hardcover version. The book is 250 pages long plus it has a list of interesting classics at the back. I highly recommend.
Book Review: The Magician's Secrets
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Plotting is Juvenile, apparently
Summary: 2 Stars
I started reading "How Fiction Works" with high hopes, and I found James Wood's detailed arguments about detail, language and character very enlightening.
However, I started to get the willies about half-way through the book when I saw the first mention of the word "plot", as it was immediately dismissed as "juvenile". "plot" is mentioned only a couple more times, and never recovers.
For a book which was written for the lay reader, this seems very mysterious. A page-turning plot is one of the joys of reading, especially for non-literati, yet James Woods does not even discuss it. He may well be right, a good plot may just be "juvenile", but why does he not discuss this?
Does he just assume that the whole world shares his disapproval of plotting? If so, he's not very smart.
Perhaps he disapproves of plotting, but has no examples with which to demonstrate this disapproval? This simply sounds dishonest.
Maybe he just forgot, and is simply sloppy.
I was hoping for a book which gave me some insight into the appreciation of literature: some insight was gained, but too much was simply left out, or beyond his ability to expose.
Book Review: middlebrow
Summary: 1 Stars
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.