Book Review: How Fiction Works, by James Wood

Montaigne once said that there is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.By this measure, James Wood's How Fiction Works is filled with excitement. Much of its conversation argues in favour of realism. The works of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Spark and Woolf are cited throughout as exemplars of all that is good in fiction. Those who see realism as a dull, predictable genre, 'just another convention reflecting the aspirations of petit bourgeois readers,' are dismissed as nonsense mongers.For example, Wood rejects critic William Gass's contention that character is just an assemblage of words, the novel a mere 'codex of bound pages.' Gass's words, he says, pose as skepticism but in fact simply represent a 'dandyish flippancy, a refusal to be taught by literature about other people. To my mind, to deny character with such extremity is essentially to deny the novel.'Though Wood is most alive when combative, he is also an intriguing and entertaining expositor. Using books culled from his library he answers, with telling detail, essential questions about the art of fiction such as: What makes detail seem really true? What is successful metaphor? What is a character? Why does fiction move us? Wood asks as the critic and answers as the writer, turning the theoretical into the practical by eliminating what Joyce calls 'scholastic stink.'With characteristic panache, Wood, who many call the English speaking world's most accomplished literary critic, fills his modestly described 'little' book with clear eyed-observation, and synapse-shaking metaphor. Details, for example, are at one point 'pushed at us as if by the croupier's stick, in one single heap,' and appear at another in a 'tattoo of randomness.' The language is often so impressive, the delivery so authoritative, that exegeses assume a mien of striking originality, of great, tuxedoed truth, when in fact many points are at least open to debate.The book is comprised of 123 blog-like entries, spread over ten chapters that deal with, among other topics, narration, detail, sympathy, character, and truth. Wood describes in simple, intelligent prose what makes a novel great. Things like using language that suits character and social milieu; like selecting enough of the right kinds of detail, important and unimportant, to produce the life-like; like using specifics ('puff[s] of palpability') to kill abstraction, in quantity enough to replicate the inexplicable irrelevant surplus that exists in life.Wood also writes well on character. He is at his best in a chapter entitled A Brief History of Unconsciousness. In a brilliant analysis of how novelistic characterization began when the theatrical soliloquy went inward, he brings together three men: King David of the Old Testament, MacBeth, and Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov.'In David's story the audience is in some important way irrelevant; in Macbeth's the audience is visible and silent, and soliloquy does indeed have the feeling not only of an address to an audience but a conversation with an interlocutor ' us ' who will not respond, a blocked dialogue; in Raskolnikov's story the audience ' the reader ' is invisible but all-seeing: so the reader has replaced David's God and Macbeth's audience. 'Another example of Wood's learned enthusiasm occurs in a chapter on language, where he analyses this: 'The day waves yellow with all its crops,' a line from Virginia Woolf's The Waves. The secret of its power, he says, 'lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving, and instead, to write the day waves: the effect is suddenly that of the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow.' It is in passages like these, where Wood takes special care to understand and communicate what it is he loves, that one deeply appreciates his work and worth.In the closing chapters, Wood returns to his argument with those who attack conventional realism, ending the book with this killing repost: 'The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional. 'That it lightly echoes what E.M. Forster says about the impossibility of defining the novel, matters not. In fact it strikes me as quite appropriate. Just as Forster's Aspects of the Novel has remained pertinent through the generations, so Wood's How Fiction Works will unarguably excite readers, as both criticism and literature, for years to come.