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.
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
It's The Truth, Not Realism, Stupid!:
I read parts of this book aloud, it was so impressive. The author gave me more to think about in his short chapters than many a weighty writer's manual. I especially enjoyed the quotations--he even has me going back to read Flaubert and Bellow again. I even caught him in an error: Dickens doesn't liken Uriah Heep's mouth to a post office; it's Mr. Wemmick, whose mouth resembles the slot on a letter box, a marvelous image of impassivity. The book also made me sit back and review my own writing--are the... more info
Wood Wind:
Wood's appropriate put-down of Updike is balanced by his questionable praise of Roth, which is, I think, unduly concerted. His vast collection of books is ready at hand, but he appears to neglect it often. I shall offer just a few examples. II Samuel 11.2 has Bathsheba bathing in the evening (at most, late afternoon); Wood has her "sunning herself." His "a ship...unnoticing" is either a pathetic fallacy or a mistransferred epithet. Why not say "a ship, its crew not noticing"? Especially bothersome is this... more info
Plotting is Juvenile, apparently:
I started reading "How Fiction Works" with high hopes, and I found James Wood's detailed arguments about detail, language and character very enlightening. However, I started to get the willies about half-way through the book when I saw the first mention of the word "plot", as it was immediately dismissed as "juvenile". "plot" is mentioned only a couple more times, and never recovers. For a book which was written for the lay reader, this seems very mysterious. A page-turning plot is one of the joys... more info
Saving the meat for last (and such a small portion):
I have to chime in and agree with the reviews saying this book is rather slight; calling it a book is almost an act of nerve. But size isn't everything, and the more important question is, how good is it? Well, there are bits that are interesting, but for the most part this reads like an introductory lecture for a community college class on fiction, and a rather sketchy introductory lecture at that. The points the author makes are generally fairly obvious, and even if they aren't when you start this book,... more info
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