Salon’s Louis Bayard on How not to Read James Wood
I knew we were in for a treat when Louis Bayard proposed in his review of How Fiction Works that its author James Wood "writes like an angel with all the austerity and voluptuousness that implies. "
Now I can see divinity and innocence, perhaps guardian spirit and grace, possibly even flightiness, but austerity and voluptuousness? If wedded to these descriptives, Bayard’d be much better served by ditching the angel and going with a skinny cherub.
His essay steers free of shoals until, after navigating through Wood’s impressive conception of free indirect speech, we are duly greeted by the treat. Here are a few mouthfuls:
We must learn to read, in short, as James Wood reads. And as delightful as that sounds, I can’t help noticing what’s missing — namely, anything to do with story. This is no accident. Wood has always been impatient with what he calls "the essential juvenility of plot," an attitude that comes through most clearly when he deigns to review genre writers.
"It never occurs to Wood that a writer like [Richard] Price — or Patricia Highsmith or Elmore Leonard or Ruth Rendell or Ray Bradbury — could find genre’s confinements liberating, or that plot is more than a contractual obligation an author must fulfill before getting to the "good parts": the describing, the characterizing, the metaphorizing. Even in Wood’s private pantheon, story is a far more organic concern than he is willing to concede."
…To act as if "Bovary" can be separated from its story is a bit like arguing that a tree can be isolated from its soil.
What draws many people to stories in the first place, says our guide, is not "the tension between author and character" as Wood purportedly has it, "but the chance to go on a journey, to see one event follow another in a way that is surprising and moving and possibly transforming. Does this make us "worse" readers than Wood? Is story simply a vestigial organ that will be cast aside by evolution? Or is it evolution’s engine?"
First off, Wood doesn’t dictate how we must learn, he states with confidence and authority his opinion on how fiction works best, and if he does ‘act as if Bovary can be separated from its story,’ I must have missed the performance. Far from saying that a tree can be isolated from its soil, I read him as saying that without a tree all you have is a pile of dirt.
Think about it, and I’m certain, contrary to Bayard’s snide suggestion otherwise, that Wood has: where does action start: in the mind. Fine, Anna Karenina, as cited by Bayard, has an affair. What’s more important: a description of her cheating on her husband, or some understanding of why she does it; of how she feels about it, of the pain and guilt and ecstasy that war within her. And the same holds for the behavior of her husband, her lover, her sister-in-law, son and other characters.
There is no action without people. So the more we know about them, the more interesting the story becomes. Story means little until and unless the reader can connect and engage with the characters responsible for it. Without establishing empathy, making readers care about what happens to these characters, without in short, ‘the good parts’ all you have is a pile of dirt.
Since I’ve been reading killer storyteller Flannery O’Connor of late, here’s what she has to say about Bayard’s soil (from Mystery and Manners):
"A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality."
"In most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. In most [bad] stories, I feel that the writer has thought of some action and then scrounged up a character to perform it…If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don’t have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don’t know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don’t, probably nobody else will."
Of course the story isn’t vestigial. It’s a vital part of who characters are and what they do.
While Bayard may not have to worry about being a ‘worse’ reader than Wood, he quite clearly should about being a worse critic.
July 24th, 2008 at 4:08 PM
Nigel,Thanks for the link to Bayard. As you are aware, this idea was one I’ve been driving at since I first read Wood’s book back in January and posted my readings over at http://wisdomofthewest.blogspot.com. I don’t know if you’ve been following our exploration of the notion of Ur-story as an analytical attempt to get at the essence of what a story is. Our recent take on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland was, accordingly, somewhat different from Wood’s. Also, from the snippet of Bayard you posted, the immediate question comes to mind as to whether he is conflating the notions of story and plot. I’ll check into it. Best of luck with the move… Best, Jim H P.S. BTW, you site doesn’t properly format questions from my Mac, using the Safari browser. I haven’t quite yet figured out the problem.
July 24th, 2008 at 4:22 PM
My pleasure Jim. To my knowledge you were the first to stress the point Bayard belatedly makes. I haven’t been following your exploration of Ur story but will make a point of doing so once things settle here a bit. Best, NB.