"How Fiction Works"
America's top literary critic shares the secrets of the books he loves.
In 1858, John Ruskin wrote his 鈥淎spects of Drawing,鈥 a 244-page primer on modern form. Rare among Victorian texts, 鈥淎spects鈥 eschewed grandiose analysis. Instead it stripped art to a series of straight lines, from object (reality) to art (reality translated and then illuminated) 鈥 from 鈥渢echnique to the world.鈥
This last clause belongs to James Wood, and he uses it to launch his own formal inquiry, How Fiction Works. Ruskin, Wood argues, had it right: he cast 鈥渁 critic鈥檚 eye over the business of creation.鈥 His authority came not 鈥渇rom his own technique as a draftsman ... but from what his eye has seen and how well, and his ability to transmit that vision into prose.鈥
Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker and former chief literary critic at the Guardian and The New Republic, is often called America鈥檚 preeminent literary critic. In 鈥淗ow Fiction Works,鈥 Wood attempts to do for literature what Ruskin did for drawing: distill the messy alchemy of art into a single, coherent system.
And for the most part 鈥 through 10 chapters, stacked loosely atop one other, and spilling over at the margins with erudition 鈥 he succeeds, spectacularly.
Drawing on his own vast fund of reading, Wood seeks out those moments when novelists come closest to achieving 鈥渓ifeness鈥 鈥 or at least 鈥渢he nearest thing to life鈥 鈥 in their art. One of the great pleasures in reading 鈥淗ow Fiction Works鈥 comes from savoring the carefully selected passages that Wood chooses to illustrate his points.
Among these: Henry James letting his adolescent narrator unconsciously parrot the adults around her in 鈥淲hat Maisie Knew鈥 (鈥淚t was on account of these things that mamma got [the governess] for such low pay, really for nothing...鈥; Chekhov describing an adulterer silently eating a melon for a half hour after an assignation; and Tolstoy noting that a husband鈥檚 ears suddenly look different to a wife enamoured of another man in 鈥Anna Karenina.鈥
Wood uses this wonderful romp through some telling moments in Western literature to talk about some of the basic building blocks of the novel: narration, detail, character, metaphor, and style.
If this sounds as if this could all get a bit esoteric, well, best to brace yourself. Wood, who is also a lecturer at Harvard, has in many ways written an academic text, one that traffics in established literary theory and history. (Some section titles, taken at random: 鈥淭ragic Dilemmas in the Novel鈥; 鈥淲ordsworth in London鈥; 鈥淔laubert and Selection.鈥)
鈥淗ow Fiction Works鈥 requires at least a familiarity with the 鈥渕ajor鈥 Western texts 鈥 an ability to differentiate between Stendhal and Flaubert, Dafoe and James, Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Here is Wood, for instance, on "The Brothers Karamazov" 鈥淐rime and Punishment鈥: 鈥淒ostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love turns into hate and guilt expresses itself as poisonous, sickly love.鈥
An analysis that challenges
Everything in Wood鈥檚 sweeping study is layered 鈥 presented, dissected, and then collapsed into a wider narrative. The prose is knotty, and unapologetically complex.
There are, to be sure, more accessible books on fiction. Among them: Joyce Carol Oates鈥檚 鈥淭he Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art,鈥 and David Lodge鈥檚 鈥淭he Art of Fiction,鈥 which collects essays from the Guardian and The Washington Post and is deservedly popular among aspiring novelists.
But Wood is aiming for something bolder in 鈥淗ow Fiction Works.鈥 Like E.M. Forster in 鈥淎spects of the Novel鈥 or Nabokov in 鈥淟ectures on Literature,鈥 he is laying out nothing less than a systemic analysis of the novel 鈥 that art form which he calls the 鈥済reat virtuoso of exceptionalism,鈥 always wriggling 鈥渙ut of the rules thrown around it.鈥
The messy business of characterization
What really fascinates Wood 鈥 and what makes the book hum 鈥 is the messy business of characterization: the 鈥渢housands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.鈥
It鈥檚 these characters, Wood argues, that are the 鈥Houdini[s] of that exceptionalism.鈥
And it鈥檚 on these characters that Wood spends most of his time. He examines and refines the 鈥淔laneur鈥 theory of noticing, first mastered by Flaubert and subsequently adopted by nearly every modern novelist, where a character does nothing at all, yet does everything at once, soaking in the world around him in a series of Technicolor snapshots.
He writes about 鈥淭he Importance of Noticing鈥 in one section and then the 鈥淧ropaganda of Noticing鈥 in another. In a particularly expert digression, titled 鈥淐haracterological Relativity,鈥 he traces the novel to its origins 鈥渋n a secular response to the religious lives and biographies of saints and holy men, and in the tradition inaugurated by the Greek writer Theophrastus.鈥
Of course, at the risk of being reductive, what Wood is really expressing is his own sort of love for the novelistic form, which seems to have driven not only his career, but also his intellectual life. In the final pages of 鈥淗ow Fiction Works,鈥 after the rhetorical fireworks have subsided, Wood writes that, 鈥淸I]n our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry ... which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit鈥檚 house to its foundations.鈥
The achievement of 鈥淗ow Fiction Works鈥 is to allow Wood鈥檚 鈥渂lue river鈥 to spill outward from the text, until the writer鈥檚 鈥渂usiness of creation鈥 has become our own.
Matt Shaer is a Monitor staff writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.