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How Fiction Works
 
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How Fiction Works (Paperback)

de James Wood (Author)
4.0étoiles sur 5  Voir tous les commentaires (1 évaluation de client)
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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 --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.


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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.
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4.0étoiles sur 5 Book Review of James Woods How Fiction Works by Nigel Beale, Fév 15 2008
Par Nigel Beale (Ottawa, Canada) - Voir tous mes commentaires
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: How Fiction Works (Hardcover)
Book Review of James Woods How Fiction Works by Nigel Beale

Montaigne once said that there is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
By this measure, James Woods 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 Gasss contention that character is just an assemblage of words, the novel a mere codex of bound pages. Gasss 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 worlds 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 croupiers 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 Dostoevskys Raskolnikov.
In Davids story the audience is in some important way irrelevant; in Macbeths 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 Raskolnikovs story the audience  the reader  is invisible but all-seeing: so the reader has replaced Davids God and Macbeths audience. 
Another example of Woods learned enthusiasm occurs in a chapter on language, where he analyses this: The day waves yellow with all its crops, a line from Virginia Woolfs 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 Forsters Aspects of the Novel has remained pertinent through the generations, so Woods How Fiction Works will unarguably excite readers, as both criticism and literature, for years to come.
742 Words Copyright Nigel Beale 2008

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