What makes a story 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. Ranging widely--from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings--Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step.The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel--plainspoken, funny, blunt--in the traditions of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
James Wood is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a visiting lecturer in English and American literature at Harvard. He is the author of two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, and of a novel, The Book Against God.
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year
An Economist Best Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year A Library Journal Best Book of the Year
What makes a story 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. Ranging widely--from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings--Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel in the traditions of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style by summing up two decades of insight with wit and concision.
"[Wood] tells us in his preface that the book 'asks theoretical questions but answers them practically,' and by practical, he means analysis of techniques as illustrated by a series of generally superb line-by-line readings. This is a technical book, a primer of sorts, of interest to the practicing writer but probably most useful and illuminating for the serious reader who enjoys the fictive ride and wants to take a look under the hood."--Christopher Tilghman, The Washington Post
"[Wood] opens his introduction by referring to John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing, published in 1857, 'a patient primer,' Wood writes, 'intended by casting a critic's eye over the business of creation, to help the practicing painter, the curious viewer, the ordinary art lover.' So How Fiction Works is, or is intended to be, a specialist's guide for the nonspecialist, and with this aim in view it remains resolutely nontechnical and amply accommodating. Wood displays his usual genius for apt quotation, and as always his enthusiasm for those writers about whom he is enthusiastic is both convincing and endearing. If Roland Barthes had not already used the title, this book might well have been called A Lover's Discourse . . . He mentions also E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's three books on the art of fiction, but only in order delicately to dismiss them--of Kundera he remarks, with what is surely a tolerantly patrician smile, that 'occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text.' Barthes and Shklovsky on the other hand, 'thought like writers: they attended to style, to words, to form, to metaphor and imagery,' a trait which Wood shares in abundance. Yet in a profound way he disagrees with and even disapproves of them and, by implication, therefore, disagrees with all other critics who, like them, 'thought like writers alienated from creative instinct, and were drawn, like larcenous bankers, to raid again and again the very source that sustained them--literary style.' This tendency to stylistic pilfering, of which, as has been implied above, Wood himself is not entirely free, led his two admired predecessors to conclusions about the novel that are 'wrongheaded' and against which Wood's book is, he tells us, a sustained argument. After this bit of spirited internecine sparring Wood adopts a brisk and practical tone, listing some of the 'essential questions' about fiction that he will address: on the nature of realism, on the definition of metaphor, on the reality or otherwise of fictional character, on the importance of detail, on point of view, on imaginative sympathy; he sets out his hope that 'this book might be one which asks theoretical questions but answers them practically--or to say it differently, asks a critic's questions and offers a writer's answers.' All this is admirable, and admirably stated . . . As we see, then, Wood's aim is an admirably old-fashioned humanistic affirmation not only of the aesthetic but of the educational value inherent in art, and specifically in the art of fiction . . . Like the figures in our dreams, the characters we encounter in fiction are really us, and the story we are told is the story of ourselves. And therein resets the delightful paradox that the novelist's transcendent lies are eminently more truthful than all the facts in the world, that they are, in Wood's formulation, 'true lies.' This is what Wood means when, dealing with fiction, he speaks of the real. It is an unfashionable view, and not the only possible and surely not the only valid one, but in the hands of this fiercely committed critic, and consummate stylist, it compels us to look that way with him."--John Banville, The New York Review of Books "Wood's models for the 'best' in fiction will not surprise either his admirers or his detractors. He has his contemporary favorites, but the models are the masters: Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, James and above all, never far from view, Flaubert. He tells us in his preface that the book 'asks theoretical questions but answers them practically,' and by practical, he means analysis of techniques as illustrated by a series of generally superb line-by-line readings. This is a technical book, a primer of sorts, of interest to the practicing writer but probably most useful and illuminating for the serious reader who enjoys the fictive ride and wants to take a look under the hood."--Christopher Tilghman, The Washington Post "His essential point is this: Novels and short stories succeed or fail according to their capacity (a capacity that has progressed over the centuries rather like the march of science) to represent, affectingly and credibly, the actual workings of the human mind as it interacts with the real world. The mind and the world, as Wood defines them, are dependable, fixed phenomena, for the most part, possessed of natural, intrinsic qualities that fiction writers in their ink-stained lab coats measure, prod, explore and seek to illustrate using a rather limited range of instruments that can be endlessly adjusted . . . Wood's precise, dialectical approach is well adapted to tracing the paradoxes behind standard literary conventions . . . he makes many nuanced observations about the fetishes and habits that mark individual writers' styles."--The New York Times Book Review "In his poem 'The Novelist,' W.H. Auden contrasts novelists with poets in terms of their different aptitudes. Poets can 'dash forward like hussars,' but novelists must '
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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
A book to be re-read by all writers and readers of fiction.:
As the old saw goes: "Don't ask me what I am reading. Ask me what I am re-reading." Wood's book How Fiction Works" tells me why I read certain works of fiction multiple times. It is a 'must' for any writer or reader of fiction who wants to know what makes certain authors' works so superb that they can be--and are--read again and again with pleasure. Wood's book is plainly stated, avoiding jargon, and brilliantly thought out, obviously based on many years of re-reading. His passion for his subject is... more info
Controversial but rewarding:
When I read books on fiction, I'm usually left with the suspicion that the author is like an art critic who, if handed a paintbrush and pushed toward a blank canvass, would suddenly complain about agonizing arthritis of the wrist or how the Muses haven't spoken to them yet that morning. They can yack all day about meaning and texture and color but they, despite the desire, can't get much past a stick figure. James Wood is not your average literary critic. He comes across as someone who writes... more info
A Number of Shortcomings But Entertaining Enough:
This book isn't a comprehensive, systematic treatise on fiction, despite the promise of the title and the almost obsessive organization of the contents into numerous chapters and sections, many of them only a few pages long. Actually, I wonder how seriously Wood takes all this, delivering impossibly ambitious chapter headings like "A Brief History of Consciousness" when the chapter's less than ten pages long. Anyway, the book's really more of a collection of essays containing some interesting observations... more info
I don't want to know how the magician does his tricks:
I have read this book in sections and I've enjoyed the discussions about books I've read very much. Mr. Woods is a clear thinker and has done careful readings of the works he speaks of. Reading it I realized that I'm not that interested in what it is writers do that draws me in. I just like being enveloped by the writing. I think it would be a great book for students and teachers of writing because it steers clear of jargon. This book is a must read.
