How Fiction Works by James Wood Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of How Fiction Works
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.