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How Fiction Works, by James Wood
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[Read by James Adams]
What makes 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. -- Raging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from ''What Maisie Knew'' to ''Make Way for Ducklings'', Woods takes the reader through the basic elements of the art of fiction, step-by-step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
- Sales Rank: #12134184 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
- Published on: 2012-07-01
- Formats: Audiobook, CD
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.80" h x .70" w x 5.20" l,
- Binding: Audio CD
- 1 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
Amazon 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
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wood takes aim at E.M. Forster's longtime standard-bearer Aspects of the Novel in this eminently readable and thought-provoking treatise on the ways, whys and hows of writing and reading fiction. Wood addresses many of the usual suspects—plot, character, voice, metaphor—with a palpable passion (he denounces a verb as pompous and praises a passage from Sabbath's Theater as an amazingly blasphemous little mélange), and his inviting voice guides readers gently into a brief discourse on thisness and chosenness, leading up to passages on how to push out, the contagion of moralizing niceness and, most importantly, a new way to discuss characters. Wood dismisses Forster's notions of flat or round characters and suggests that characters be evaluated in terms of transparencies and opacities determined not by the reader's expectations of how a character may act (as in Forster's formula), but by a character's motivations. Wood, now at the New Yorker and arguably the pre-eminent critic of contemporary English letters, accomplishes his mission of asking a critic's questions and offer[ing] a writer's answers with panache. This book is destined to be marked up, dog-eared and cherished. (Aug.)
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Review
“Deservedly famous for [his] intellectual dazzle, literary acuteness and moral seriousness . . . Wood writes like a dream.” —Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review
Most helpful customer reviews
141 of 158 people found the following review helpful.
The Magician's Secrets
By Charlus
James Wood conducts a concise but edifying tour behind the curtain of novel making, aimed primarily at the student and interested layperson. He examines the techniques used by the novelist that readers routinely take for granted. By spotlighting and defamiliarizing them, he demonstrates how they have evolved over the centuries, including examples of both good and bad usage.
Topics include free indirect style, the conciousness of characters, reality in fiction, successful use of metaphor and simile, different registers of tone, among others.
One of his most interesting discussions is on characters: how have different writers approached creating characters, including a history of critical responses to those approaches.
This is typical of Wood's modus operandi: take a basic component of novel writing and examine the assumptions we make as readers in order to understand and use what we are reading; what are the conventions writers and readers have evolved, and how did they come into being. Wood's style here is mostly shorn of the metaphors that illuminate his prior collections of criticism; the writing is invariably clear and succinct.
My only disappointment was in his episodic inability to refrain from revealing key plot points (i.e. Anna and the train) that may diminish the pleasure for future readers.
This is the best book I know to make one a more observant and appreciative reader.
247 of 309 people found the following review helpful.
Self-important and filled with jargon
By Susan Wise Bauer
Too much micro-analysis, too little attention to the whole; too much scorn for the "popular," too much delight in his own prose ("Nearly all of Muriel Spark's novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved"), way too much jargon ("Characterological relativity"? Really?).
Wood is intensely interested in small things. In use of detail, in single phrases and sentences, in rhythm and vocabulary. Which is fine, and I gave the book two stars instead of one because he makes useful observations about the construction of prose. His section on "The Rise of Detail" was particularly good, and I plan on rereading and making use of it.
But he pays no attention to the entire novel. He spends page after page after page rhapsodising about single sentences and details. Saul Bellow's description of flying, he enthuses, tells the reader exactly what flying feels like. "And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence." (Yep, that's been my entire experience of flying up to this point. I blandly inhabit a deprived eloquence.) What the entire novel does, why we might read it, what effect the whole sweep of it might have on us, and (most important for a book called How Fiction Works) how the writer constructed it-all of these things are ignored.
He's also a snob. He loathes something he calls "commercial realism," a style which "lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling," and instead praises the obscure, the high, and the literary. Plot he dismisses as unnecessary-unless your reader is slow and uninterested in real fiction. The novel does not have plot, he implies; it does something much more important. Yet he can't really express what this is without resorting to academic jargon and self-consciously pretty writing: "And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere." I have a mental picture of Mr. Wood reading that sentence out loud and kissing his fingers like a chef: What a beautiful sentence! (Maybe, but what does it mean?)
And talk about a gratuitous slap: when David "sees Bathsheba," Wood writes (on the way to analysing David's character as one who "sees, and acts...[a]s far as the narrative is concerned, he does not think"), "what happens to him is not an idea, or at least not in the way that Jesus, that cheerless psychologist, meant when he said that for a man to look lustfully upon a woman is already to commit adultery."
"Cheerless psychologist," huh? What pithiness, what cutting insight. (That is sarcasm.)
But there it is. He is flip, self-satisfied, self-absorbed. He is uninterested in the entire novel, obsessed instead with single phrases and turns, with minor effects and details. He scorns plot as "essentially juvenile" but leaves us with vagueness about what the novel should be doing instead. (Apparently "subtle analysis of character" is important, but he doesn't make clear what this is.) Buy The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist by Thomas McCormick instead.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Thisness and Lifeness
By Bryan Byrd
'How Fiction Works' is a reasoned approach, element by element, to Mr. Wood's ideas of *why* successful literature is effective. This is theory, but not so technical that readers unfamiliar with literary criticism (like me) will feel out of their depths. In fact, Mr. Wood's style and arguments are not unfairly complex, and those who would be interested in this kind of critique should have little trouble grasping his concepts.
That isn't to say that it's a cursory examination. Though quite short, the author roots around in literature's history and plucks out gems from Flaubert, Bellow, and Dostoyevsky among others, for exemplary illustrations of:
-The difference between detail that is merely place setting, detail that inhabits the object described, and detail that sells the story (Thisness),
-What's really real (lifeness),
-Going beyond Point of View and into Free Indirect Style, and how even the masters overwrite,
-And a rebuttal to E.M. Forster, in Forster's 'The Aspect of the Novel', of the idea of round and flat characters, along with other notes on dialogue, language and "A Brief History of Consciousness".
If Mr. Wood, in his (mostly) earnest and guiding style, had limited himself to these discussions, then I think the book's success (regardless if I agree with every idea) would be assured. What is frankly bewildering to me is the inclusion of Mr. Wood's short, throwaway asides concerning religion.
Mr. Wood establishes his opinion quickly - in the second paragraph of the book, he quotes Phillip Larkin (religion as "That vast musical moth-eaten brocade") when asserting that both religion and the eighteenth century's stylistic tendency toward 'authorial omniscience' have "had (their) day". If the goal had been to use the Larkin quote as an example of detail, or of style, then fair enough - but it is there solely to accompany a dusty, outdated convention in order to amplify and enhance it. Ironic comparison, I suppose, if you feel the way Mr. Wood does about religion. Insulting if not.
Then, on page 143, as Mr. Wood opts to refer to Jesus Christ as "that cheerless psychologist", it dawns on me that he may have a separate point other than literary criticism he is advocating. I would never deny him that opportunity, and if I had bought the book "How I think Christianity is Slightly Ridiculous" by James Wood, then I would expect such commentary. But this is "How Fiction Works", and it is a testament to the power of his irrelevant asides that I remember them as well as his theoretical statements.
Perhaps it is a leap, but I can't help connect my inferred views of Mr. Wood's take on religion with his overly simplistic critique of the "contagion of moralizing niceness" permeating modern reviews which denounce a work because of its unlikable characters. Mr. Wood posits that unlikable characters, even monstrous ones, are justified in artistic works to explore that facet of humanity. I agree. I think it is *absolutely* justified, but to make general statements implying that those who dislike a book's characters are somehow too ignorant (or too timid) to discern the book's artistic merit is nonsense. The insinuation is that I should somehow sublimate my moral repugnance and celebrate the artist regardless - which I will not do until I've satisfied for myself what the author's intent is. Is he advocating such behavior or examining it? The difference is critical. Even in the example Mr. Wood provides, a film review in the NY Times, the review's author felt as though the authors of the film "seem to want us to sympathize with, even applaud," lecherous behavior. That is acutely different from simply 'disliking' the film's characters. Mr. Wood believes that "A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction" - and in this regard, I think he should have taken his own implied advice.
What other proof does Mr. Wood's offer for this plague of moralizing niceness? The Times review, and "A glance at the thousands of foolish 'reader reviews' on Amazon.com, with their complaints about 'dislikable characters'" It is telling that he chose to include the word 'foolish' in his assertion. Without it, the idea remains essentially the same. With it, he condemns the whole Amazon review system. I find it puzzling that hobby reviewers are so frightening to noted critics such as James Wood and Cynthia Ozick - so much so that they make a special effort to discredit us.
It is entirely possible that I've parsed his words to finely, or am too sensitive to these issues, but I find it hard to recommend a book that, in what could have been an educative and enjoyable experience, instead uses its main subject as a cover for (not so) veiled insults. The larger question is why someone would feel it necessary to include inflammatory remarks in a book on literary theory at all. A critic who makes his living analyzing words surely knew what effect his own could have - which, to me, removed the complexity of literary theory from the forefront of the book and instituted James Wood's opinions as the subject. Retailing at 14 dollars on the bookshelf, that makes it 13 dollars and 98 cents too much.
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