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Literature & Fiction |
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How Fiction Works
written by James Wood
Studio : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2008-07-22
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Released : 2008-07-22
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780374173401
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 13 reviews)
List Price : $24.00
Our Price : $14.30
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Product Description |
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read. |
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Americancivilwar.com |
Americancivilwar Best of the Month, July 2008: The first thing you'll notice about How Fiction Works is its size. At 252 pages, it's a marvel of economy for a book that asks such a huge question and right away you'll want to know (as you might at the start of a new novel) what the author has in store. James Wood takes only his own bookshelves as his literary terrain for this study, and that in itself is the most delightful gift: he joins his audience as a reader, citing his chosen texts judiciously--ranging from Henry James (from whom he takes the best epigraph to a book I've ever read) to Nabokov, Joyce, Updike, and more--to explore not just how fiction works, mechanically speaking, but to reflect on how a novelist's choices make us feel that a novel ultimately works ... or doesn't. Wood remarks that you have to "read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it." His terrific bibliography will surely be a boon to anyone's education, but it's his masterful writing that you'll want to keep reading over the course of your life. --Anne Bartholomew
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Best book on writing fiction ever. |
I learnt more about reading and writing fiction from this little wonder than anything else. Its also an opinionated, amusing joy to read.
I leant it to a freind who loves it to, but I cant wait to get it back again. |
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big ideas, cramped library? |
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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. |
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A personal and practical approach to a master critic |
This book works for me on many levels.
It was great fun to read the many thoughtful reviews and comments here on Americancivilwar. I found the Reviews of Charlus, Stanley H. Nemeth and madman particularly thoughtful and insightful; I found the Comments of Doug - Haydn Fan', especially Doug - Haydn Fan, The Ghost of M, Thomas Plotkin, and Stanley Nemeth first rate. Literary fireworks of the first order, all engendered by Wood's little volume, and I enjoyed the show very much.
A similar collection of reactions -- less erudite in general -- appeared in "The New York Times Book Review" for August 31. It's fascinating that a major critic can engender so much passion and so much learning, all at the same time.
Wood helps me deepen my understanding, appreciation and pleasure in reading great fiction. Five years ago Edith Grossman released a wonderful translation of Don Quixote. After reading Wood's review in "The New Yorker", I re-read Cervantes's great work with deeper pleasure. "[I]t is worth reminding ourselves of the gross, the worldly, the violent, and, above all, the comic in "Don Quixote"--worth reminding ourselves that we are permitted the odd secular guffaw while reading it. If all of modern fiction comes out of the Knight's cape, one reason might be that Cervantes's novel contains the major comic tropes, from the farcical to the delicately ironic." Comment 1, fn 1.
Wood infuriates me, and teaches me. He analyzes an essay by Orwell in which a condemned man avoids a puddle on the way to his execution. "There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit."
But wait a minute: could the condemned man have been saving his shoes for another inmate? Perhaps he was a Buddist avoiding killing a living thing hidden in the puddle; the Life of Pi teaches us that practicing religion at the end of our lives may help us avoid missing "a better story". Perhaps the prisoner hoped for a pardon? Was his avoidance similar to Commander Scobee's last recorded act pressing the communication button on Challenger? Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin describes two deaths in moments. Johnson, according to Boswell, thought hanging "concentrates [one's] mind wonderfully." Was that prisoner's act truly "a margin of surplus".
The previous paragraph is my pale imitation of one of Wood's often repeated effects; as Kirn describes it in the "Times" review: "He drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed." [Footnote 2.]
Wood's references compliment me when I am reminded of remembered reading. They challenge me when I know most, but not all of the references, and inspire me to search out the gaps in my learning. They irritate and intimidate me when I don't know any of the references at all.
Wood's book provides a good index and a very useful chronology of his major references. His book would have been greatly improved for me if he had provided a glossary of terms -- I'm not sure exactly what he means by Modern and Post-Modern fiction, and not at all sure what fiction preceded Modern fiction. What exactly is "lifeness" -- and how can "fiction" be imbued with "lifeness"? -- at one level they seem to be contradictory ideas. Is "lifeness" different from "the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiry."
I would also have liked a glossary because his terms collapse into each other: "when I talk about free indirect style, I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real ...." I'm not sure I understand the margins of the these words and phrases and others he uses throughout his book.
The search function here on Americancivilwar helps a bit -- I don't footnote Wood's words in this Review because one can search for his words there -- but this is one book where Kindle would come in very handy with book in hand. To really understand Wood, I need to re-read Madame Bovary (the Wall translation), and Wood has inspired me to read A House for Mr. Biswas for the first time. A Kindle at my side with Wood on board would enhance both journeys.
At the end of the day, though, I wonder if I'm really the "common reader" Wood is speaking to; should a "common reader" need these aids when Wood has "tried to reduce what Joyce calls 'the true scholastic stink' to bearable levels." In a discussion of dislikeable characters, Wood writes: "A glance at the thousands of foolish 'reader reviews' on Americancivilwar.com, with their complaints about 'dislikeable charcters,' confirms a contagion of moralizing niceness."
Wood took a similar whack at Americancivilwar reviewers and also at reading groups in an article in "The Guardian" earlier this year:
'But a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish "reader reviews" on Americancivilwar, with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow'"."
As a Reviewer here on Americancivilwar and as a member of a couple of book clubs, I may not be Wood's "common reader". I might be better off reading some of interesting alternative texts suggested by Wood and the Americancivilwar folks in the reviews and comments here: Viktor Shklovsky, Roland Barthes, Percey Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, "discussing the symbolists", C.S. Lewis for "telling and exact readings of writing and especially the art of storytelling", Nabokov "especially on Gogol" and his memoir, Speak, Memory, Flannery O'Connor in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, and even the "Glenn Gould Reader" on why Gould didn't like Mozart as much he liked Bach: "it was aesthetics and not mere taste."
Despite my doubts and some excellent alternatives, I'll undoubtedly continue to follow Wood's work as well, with pleasure and perhaps with a Kindle at hand. I'm sure I'll deepen my enjoyment of fiction.
Robert C. Ross 2008
Addendum: I wonder if Wood's attack on "silly" Americancivilwar reviews and book clubs might have been in response to attacks on The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud, Wood's wife. The most negative review at the moment is by D. West "Bones", who writes: "In my opinion, none of the main characters are anywhere near as adorable as the author keeps insisting they are. Their most notable characteristic is a non-stop (and rather interchangeable) flow of campy repartee that might convey intellect, success, pretension, heartbreak, or whatever to someone steeped in their milieu but which kept me at a considerable emotional distance." D. West offers her copy of the book free to the reader, as does a the writer of a Comment, who offers up the eight copies from her book club. B. |
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Must I care How Fiction Works? |
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. |
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The Cover is the Key |
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. |
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