How Fiction Works by James Wood Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of How Fiction Works
Book Review: Literary Criticism
Summary: 4 Stars
I am enjoying this book, but am not enough of a scholar to give a serious or creditable evaluation. Wood talks about the author's aesthetic distance, and wonders if such a thing is even possible, because all the voices of narration are ultimately the author's voice, and all characters are ultimately aspects of the author as well. He devotes some pages to characters that are either flat, caricatures, or rounded and full. He cites many writers to illustrate, which I enjoy.I haven't finished the book, but I would recommend it to anyone who loves fiction and wants a deeper understanding of the elements that make it either work or not.Book Review: Must I care How Fiction Works?
Summary: 2 Stars
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.
Book Review: New wine in old bottles
Summary: 5 Stars
Wood's beautifully written book adds new insights to the time-honored ways of analyzing novels. Not just for me, a casual reader of fiction, but for my English-professor wife. Don't let that scare you away. While the old chestnuts of narrative voice, setting, etc. are covered, Wood brings new life and depth to each of them. Reading this book will deepen your enjoyment of every novel/short story you read after it.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: 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.