How Fiction Works by James Wood Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of How Fiction Works
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: 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: Self-important and filled with jargon
Summary: 2 Stars
Too much micro-analysis, too little attention to the whole; too much scorn for the "popular," too much delight in his own prose ("Nearly all of Muriel Spark's novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved"), way too much jargon ("Characterological relativity"? Really?).
Wood is intensely interested in small things. In use of detail, in single phrases and sentences, in rhythm and vocabulary. Which is fine, and I gave the book two stars instead of one because he makes useful observations about the construction of prose. His section on "The Rise of Detail" was particularly good, and I plan on rereading and making use of it.
But he pays no attention to the entire novel. He spends page after page after page rhapsodising about single sentences and details. Saul Bellow's description of flying, he enthuses, tells the reader exactly what flying feels like. "And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence." (Yep, that's been my entire experience of flying up to this point. I blandly inhabit a deprived eloquence.) What the entire novel does, why we might read it, what effect the whole sweep of it might have on us, and (most important for a book called How Fiction Works) how the writer constructed it-all of these things are ignored.
He's also a snob. He loathes something he calls "commercial realism," a style which "lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling," and instead praises the obscure, the high, and the literary. Plot he dismisses as unnecessary-unless your reader is slow and uninterested in real fiction. The novel does not have plot, he implies; it does something much more important. Yet he can't really express what this is without resorting to academic jargon and self-consciously pretty writing: "And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere." I have a mental picture of Mr. Wood reading that sentence out loud and kissing his fingers like a chef: What a beautiful sentence! (Maybe, but what does it mean?)
And talk about a gratuitous slap: when David "sees Bathsheba," Wood writes (on the way to analysing David's character as one who "sees, and acts...[a]s far as the narrative is concerned, he does not think"), "what happens to him is not an idea, or at least not in the way that Jesus, that cheerless psychologist, meant when he said that for a man to look lustfully upon a woman is already to commit adultery."
"Cheerless psychologist," huh? What pithiness, what cutting insight. (That is sarcasm.)
But there it is. He is flip, self-satisfied, self-absorbed. He is uninterested in the entire novel, obsessed instead with single phrases and turns, with minor effects and details. He scorns plot as "essentially juvenile" but leaves us with vagueness about what the novel should be doing instead. (Apparently "subtle analysis of character" is important, but he doesn't make clear what this is.) Buy The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist by Thomas McCormick instead.
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 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.