The audacious title of
James Wood's How Fiction Works begs for objections, or it would if the literary
critic and novelist weren't so persistently, humbly persuasive in explaining
his take on how words pull us into a world of their own. In a book aimed at
readers and writers alike that draws on everything from Jane Austen to Philip
Roth, Wood singles out the elements that divide successful fiction from
failures.
The failures are notable
mostly in their absence. Wood is generous in his appreciation of a broad
assortment of fiction, in part because he seeks to bring it all under a
wide-spanning critical umbrella. Opening the book with a discussion of voice,
Wood refreshes readers' memories about first, second, and third-person narration
and the various subcategories. Then he launches into the argument that most
forms of narration drift toward what he calls "free, indirect style," in which
the narrator more or less hovers around the consciousness of the story's focal
characters. When James Joyce opens "The Dead" with the line, "Lily, the
caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet," he lets the character
dictate the exact right wrong word to describe Lily's sense of being
overwhelmed.
And speaking of le mot
juste,
Wood returns repeatedly to the primary importance of Gustave Flaubert as a
writer whose gift for psychological immersion and painterly detail makes his
influence difficult to overestimate. But Wood isn't so admiring as to be
overwhelmed, writing of the "strange burden of 'chosenness' we feel around
Flaubert's details." By Wood's estimation, the writer who disappears into the
writing accomplishes the most. Better still: the writer who captures a piece of
the world on the page. Defining realism broadly, Wood has little patience for
those ready to write it off as a style best kept in the past.
He isn't afraid to take
aim at other examples of what he regards as faulty thinking, either. He singles
out E.M. Forster's notion of flat and round characters as past its expiration
date, and has no use for the notion that characters must be likeable and
identifiable for fiction to work. Ideally, writing is a place to transcend the
limits of self in the search for truth, a heady notion beautifully conveyed in
a book written by a true believer.