How Fiction Works by James Wood Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of How Fiction Works
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: The Practice of Criticsm
Summary: 5 Stars
I should say up front that James Wood is living my dream. A staff writer for the New Yorker, chief literary critic for The Guardian, professor of the practice of criticism at Harvard University, and a respected novelist to boot (and he's only five years older than I am!), Wood might be the closest thing we have to a successor to Edmund Wilson. So any criticisms that follow can probably be chalked up to little more than jealousy--the literary equivalent of suggesting that Wood has fat ankles.
How Fiction Works is a compact, even squat little hardcover, the very materiality of which seems bent on recalling an era and ethos of reading "before theory," as it were. Somehow the 4.5" x 7" format--coupled with wide margins, classic font, and running page heads that indicate the content of each page--manage to evoke the sorts of predecessors that Wood himself invokes: Ruskin's Elements of Drawing and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. The materiality of the book primes a certain approach, a certain horizon of expectation for the reader and seems to effect a first shift in readerly stance that Woods' criticism would encourage: attention to the craft.
If the title sounds like a dreary, mechanical textbook for Creative Writing classes the world over, in fact the book is as much for readers as writers. This is a work of criticism, not a Writers-Workshop-in-a-box. Nor is this a book which sets out to demystify the novel as if Wod were a member of the guild willing to share with us the secrets of the illusionist. While it is attentive to concrete realities of mechanics, How Fiction Works is not a disenchantment of the novel, disclosing to us the code or formula that makes fiction work. In fact, any reader will thank Wood for breaking open fiction in new ways in the opening chapter on narration alone. Like all good criticism, Wood names and articulates our intuitions and gut reactions. For instance, he names exactly the discomfort I have long felt about straight-up, confident, magisterial third person narration one finds in someone like Jane Austen (or Joyce Carol Oates, for that matter?). On this point he cites W.G. Sebald:
Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history.
Wood goes on to provide a breezy but profound analysis of different kinds of narration which almost turns into a reverie on free indirect style. In this context he provides a stinging critique of Updike's failures in this respect in his 2006 novel, Terrorist, where the narrator's language refuses to bend "toward its characters and their habits of speech." Of course, some novels are exercises and experiments bent on seeing the extent to which this is possible. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury comes to mind, but more recently, something like Kieron Smith, Boy in which James Kelman tries to be the ventriloquist of a boy from working class Glasgow. But such a project is always beset by a bit of a ruse. After all, how likely is it that a tough young Glaswegian is going to take the time to pen a 432 page memoir, even if it is in the dialect that Kelman seeks to reproduce?
Wood is out to explain how fiction works, not in order to provide a template for would-be writers to go enact a formula, but more for readers who appreciate good criticism as a portal into the further enchanting mysteries of fiction (as when we ask ourselves sometimes, "Now, just how does this paper-and-ink artifact manage to do this to me?"). While Wood tips his hat to Barthes, this is not a "theory-driven" account of literature. Indeed, there is something kind of "lunch box"--or rather, "tool box"--about it in its meat-and-potatoes attention to the basic elements of narration, detail, character, language, register, and dialogue (ending with a short theoretical riff on one of Wood's enduring interests: the question of realism).
The range of Woods' interlocutors is almost dizzying (from Homer to Cormac McCarthy), but a couple of heroes keep asserting themselves: Flaubert and Henry James, even thought both were prone to what Wood sees as the persistent temptation of the modern novel--an aestheticist wallowing in detail (see Updike). But Flaubert and James are simply the leading voices of a rich choir that Wood orchestrates, with parts for Cervantes and Defoe as well as Pynchon and Delillo.
It's on this point that I would register one criticism. In what is, without question, a landmark book that I have already profited from quite immeasurably, I do find Wood sometimes wears his learning a little heavily. To be more precise, there are times when he slides from being precocious to being just rather obnoxious. Take, for instance, an opening "Note on Footnotes and Dates" in which Wood feels it necessary to point out that "I have used only the books that I actually own--the books at hand in my study--to produce this little volume." Why tell us that? Perhaps to deflect critics who will decry books that have been ignored--though, in that case, the criticism would still hold, wouldn't it? For instance, one can imagine politically correct assistant professors of English lamenting the "Eurocentric" nature of Wood's book ("Where is the Indonesian, post-colonial fiction?!") and thus Wood trying to head them off at the pass by saying, "Look, I was just working with what I had to hand." But then the criticism would be: "Not only is this 'little book' Eurocentrist and still-colonial, but James Wood is! He doesn't have any Indonesian, post-colonial fiction in his personal library!"
Instead, what is intended as a mark of humble constraints (in producing "this little volume") comes off as backhanded pomposity. This is augmented by the function of several of the scant footnotes in the text which seem like little more than Wood showing off. These includes little asides which catalogue instances of self-plagiarism in Tolstoy, Dickens, James and McCarthy (p. 65); or the convention of allegorical names in Tolstoy, Thackeray, Wordsworth, and Evelyn Waugh (p. 115); or the cast of minor characters with writers' names in Proust, Bernanos, Updike, Jones, Tolstoy (again!), and others (p. 162). Methinks Wood doth indulge a bit. (Read: fat ankles!)
Finally, let me take up one particular piece of criticism in which Wood, contrary to his otherwise exemplary practice, seems to miss the point precisely because he fails to appreciate a theological point in literature. (In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, Wood has shown his superiority to a critic like Christopher Hitchens precisely in his ability to appreciate theological nuance.) The context is his marvelous discussion of free indirect style. Not surprisingly, he holds up Henry James' What Maisie Knew as a model. Though told from the third person, Wood notes how James' manages to make the narrative bend to the voice and world of young Maisie Farange, who is bounced between her divorced parents and attaches herself to one of her governesses, Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Wix had a daughter, Clara Matilda, who died tragically just when she was about Maisie's age, and Maisie often accompanies Mrs. Wix to Clara's grave in the cemetary at Kensal Green. Wood wants us to focus on James' ability to write from the third person in a way that invites us to inhabit young Maisie's confusion, torn between her mother (who speaks poorly of the lowly Mrs. Wix) and the governess, but also confused by the absence of Clara Matilda. He hones in on this passage:
Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven and yet, embarrasingly, also in Kensal Green, where they had been together to see her little huddled grave.
Wood suggests that "James's genius gathers in one word: 'embarrasingly.'" Whose word is "embarrasingly," he asks? "It is Maisie's: it is embarrassing for a child to witness adult grief, and we know that Mrs. Wix has taken to referring to Clara Matilda as Maisie's 'little dead sister.'" Wood is exactly right that "embarrasingly" is Maisie's language, and thus rightly notes James' ability to bend the narrative--even in the third person--to Maisie's world so that we hear Maisie and not (just) James. But Wood seems to completely misinterpret just what is "embarrassing" for Maisie. It is not witnessing Mrs. Wix's grief. It is, rather, the theological tension that even young Maisie experiences: how can Clara Matilda be in heaven and in Kensal Green? Wood seems to completely miss the also in the passage. It is the conjunction that is the cause of embarrassment.
These minor criticisms aside, How Fiction Works leaves one eager to read anew.
Book Review: The True and the Beautiful, but What Happened to the Good?
Summary: 3 Stars
James Wood's book is largely an engaging read filled with pleasing sentences and often telling illustration. It deals principally with writerly skills, and those particular uses of them which make in novels for the Beautiful. Among the most important of these is the indirect or ironic narrative style whose virtues Wood demonstrates in detail. The author in similar fashion moves on to treat with equivalent freshness such expected areas as characterization and language. Then, toward the end of the book, he turns to the question of the True in novels, and persuasively argues for what he calls "lifeness." Such concerns of Beauty and Truth are of obvious centrality to both the creative writer and the appreciative reader of novels. So far, I'd argue, so good.
The book finally and sadly disappoints, however, and it does so owing to the author's inadequate and stale, if still widely fashionable view of what in novels constitutes the third element in Plato's trinity, the Good. About the freshest Wood gets in his noticeably scant treatment of this topic is a twice repeated quotation from George Eliot on how novel reading can expand our sympathies, enlarge our human capacities and horizons. Surely this is true as far as it goes, but Wood implies much more here which he doesn't seem to realize is highly questionable. If I read him rightly, he is praising readers of novels who leave Plato's Cave in order just to become "non-judgmental" multiculturalists, open to all times, places, and persons. And this assumption, held apparently with uncritical dogmatism, is as far as Wood goes in considering the Good.
Wood's thinking, despite his own early voiced Joycean fear of pedantry, finally itself smells too much of the shop. He values the difficulty of the doing almost to the exclusion of the human worth of the thing done. His enthusiasm, for example, for the artistry in a particularly gross passage from Philip Roth coupled with an ignoring of any deeper moral considerations may stand as the signature of Wood's strengths and weaknesses as a critic. What he omits in bowing before the artistry of any skillful wielder of words is what Flannery O'Connor included when she quipped that for Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" adultery was a sin whereas for rootless postmodern fiction writers, critics, and readers it is at most "an inconvenience."
Flannery O'Connor, by the way, whose own brilliant book of criticism "Mystery and Manners" Wood oddly neglects, shared with Plato and Tolstoy the belief that art was so powerful a force, it could be dangerous, to the artist and to society. On the other hand, PBS a few years ago inadvertently revealed its cruder idea that art in our time had at last been defanged and was instead now happily insipid, the station even going so far as to offer subscribers a self-congratulatory button sporting the phrase "Fear No Art." In his inadequate handling of the "Good" in the art of the novel, James Wood for all his sophistication places himself, I'm afraid, on PBS' side of the court.
Book Review: Wood Wind
Summary: 2 Stars
Wood's appropriate put-down of Updike is balanced by his questionable praise of Roth, which is, I think, unduly concerted. His vast collection of books is ready at hand, but he appears to neglect it often. I shall offer just a few examples. II Samuel 11.2 has Bathsheba bathing in the evening (at most, late afternoon); Wood has her "sunning herself." His "a ship...unnoticing" is either a pathetic fallacy or a mistransferred epithet. Why not say "a ship, its crew not noticing"? Especially bothersome is this passage: "...what James in 'What Maisie Knew' calls 'the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.'" This is followed by "that blue river of truth, curling somewhere." James wrote "flowed," not "curled." Wood, elsewhere an astute critic of postmodernist excesses, is, in this short volume needlessly rushed and suprisingly careless.Book Review: big ideas, cramped library?
Summary: 3 Stars
Beautiful writing and sharp insights throughout. The Wood Channel could do for literature what ESPN did for sports if Wood would sacrifice a bit his devotion to The Canon. This turns out to be the conceit of selecting books only from his library. Its admission standards start to feel claustrophobic after a while. Flaubert and H. James admirers will find endless refreshment from these pages. If you hated Madame Bovary and couldn't lift up Dostoevsky long enough to get from Raskolnikov's crime to his punishment, you will find yourself searching in vain for a wider selection of stories, authors, and techniques. Wood turns messy received literary tradition into fresh, exciting, and understandable language. He's the Constance Garnett for the rest of us. But his inattention to more unorthodox fictional workings might leave some literary X Games enthusiasts hungry for more.