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Avg. Rating: 3.5
A terrific reference --
If you write, let's hope you do massive amounts of reading good literature. If you are a reader of substance, James Woods' book will edify your intellectual and emotional connection to what you have already learned, albiet subconsciously. All the devices are there, the silliness, the overworked metaphors, the sly styles, the magic. He is obviously a fan of Flaubert at whose feet Woods lays much credit for today's (good) writing. In fact, it's nearly an homage. So many great books are referenced, referred to, excerpted -- it makes you want to go back and re-read them all in order to see the work with a clearer vision. What we enjoyed as plain old storytelling, Woods shows us is hardly random and not without great intellectual and artistic effort. Woods compares great writers (old and new) to each other showing us flaws and greatness in each of them.
Highly recommended for readers and writers.
A Literary Critic Who Doesn't Resort to Snobbery
I was delighted that James Wood didn't take a condescending attitude about his subject. He doesn't say this is how it should be, but this is how it is and here is why. At first I didn't understand what the hell he was talking about, but somewhere during the second essay I adjusted to his style, became acclimated if you will, and I ended up getting a lot out of it. His examination of language in fiction was my favorite part.
I recommend this for anyone who appreciates an analytical approach to writing technique. This is not a how-to, however. Rather, it is more of a commentary.
As Impenetrable as the Fiction Referenced
I am one of those people who think if they buy and read enough writing self-help books, perhaps one day I will evolve to a level of confidence that I can begin putting my thoughts in coherent form on paper. For that reason I bought HOW FICTION WORKS. Perhaps this tome would be able to reveal the secret hidden from me. Had I been a PhD in literature, I might have had success. And I suppose there are those out there who will benefit from Wood's approach. I am not one of them. For me, HOW FICTION WORKS is a pedantic treatment of writing completely beyond my grasp. Wood writes, "Mindful of the common reader, I have tried to reduce what Joyce calls `the true scholastic stink' to bearable levels." He failed. Wood begins with a misguided assumption that the wide audience will share his background and familiarity with hard-to-reach literature from not only James Joyce, but Tolstoy, Humbert, Svevo, Wooster, Sebald, Dostoevsy, frequently referenced, Flaubert, and a hundred others. On occasion, he incorporates passages from important works by these giants to make a point, but more often than not he assumes you know Wooster's character Mr. Umtyfrump and how he reacted to so and so.
Without adequately describing his frame of reference, Wood assumes a knowledge base from his readers I doubt exists in all but a few percent. He jumps into esoteric literary terminology such as omniscient narration, direct speeh, free indirect speech, free indirect style, free indirect narration ... the list goes on.
I have two Bachelor's Degrees, two Master's Degrees, and some 45 years of being a "constant reader." But even I do not rise to the level of Wood's "common reader." I find high literature impenetrable. Judging by what sells well, I assume I am more common than not. So if you are an aspiring writer and Look to Stephen King or John Grisham as icons, then I don't think HOW FICTION WORKS is for you. On the other hand, if you want to better understand how Flaubert changed the fiction novel and wish to compare and contrast that to Christopher Isherwood, Cervantes, and/or Dickens, then you might enjoy it.
The True and the Beautiful, but What Happened to the Good?
James Wood's book is largely an engaging read filled with pleasing sentences and often telling illustration. It deals principally with writerly skills, and those particular uses of them which make in novels for the Beautiful. Among the most important of these is the indirect or ironic narrative style whose virtues Wood demonstrates in detail. The author in similar fashion moves on to treat with equivalent freshness such expected areas as characterization and language. Then, toward the end of the book, he turns to the question of the True in novels, and persuasively argues for what he calls "lifeness." Such concerns of Beauty and Truth are of obvious centrality to both the creative writer and the appreciative reader of novels. So far, I'd argue, so good.
The book finally and sadly disappoints, however, and it does so owing to the author's inadequate and stale, if still widely fashionable view of what in novels constitutes the third element in Plato's trinity, the Good. About the freshest Wood gets in his noticeably scant treatment of this topic is a twice repeated quotation from George Eliot on how novel reading can expand our sympathies, enlarge our human capacities and horizons. Surely this is true as far as it goes, but Wood implies much more here which he doesn't seem to realize is highly questionable. If I read him rightly, he is praising readers of novels who leave Plato's Cave in order just to become "non-judgmental" multiculturalists, open to all times, places, and persons. And this assumption, held apparently with uncritical dogmatism, is as far as Wood goes in considering the Good.
Wood's thinking, despite his own early voiced Joycean fear of pedantry, finally itself smells too much of the shop. He values the difficulty of the doing almost to the exclusion of the human worth of the thing done. His enthusiasm, for example, for the artistry in a particularly gross passage from Philip Roth coupled with an ignoring of any deeper moral considerations may stand as the signature of Wood's strengths and weaknesses as a critic. What he omits in bowing before the artistry of any skillful wielder of words is what Flannery O'Connor included when she quipped that for Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" adultery was a sin whereas for rootless postmodern fiction writers, critics, and readers it is at most "an inconvenience."
Flannery O'Connor, by the way, whose own brilliant book of criticism "Mystery and Manners" Wood oddly neglects, shared with Plato and Tolstoy the belief that art was so powerful a force, it could be dangerous, to the artist and to society. On the other hand, PBS a few years ago inadvertently revealed its cruder idea that art in our time had at last been defanged and was instead now happily insipid, the station even going so far as to offer subscribers a self-congratulatory button sporting the phrase "Fear No Art." In his inadequate handling of the "Good" in the art of the novel, James Wood for all his sophistication places himself, I'm afraid, on PBS' side of the court.
middlebrow
A disappointment. Based on a few print reviews I was expecting something really terrific, and there are four or five nicely turned passages here. But Mr. Wood has a terribly narrow sense of what makes fiction worthwhile, and seems to have no feeling at all for the pleasures of plot or the music of contemporary language. For him it all comes down to the gentlemanly delectation of "fine moments" in novels. One could forgive him this fussiness if it were done exceptionally well, but in fact this book is a kind of inflated pamphlet, with huge margins and large print, which simply strings together some ideas about narration and character. It is a real step down from a delightful book I first read at college in the 1960s and have returned to several times since: Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, which I'm happy to see is still in print. It is really scandalous that Mr. Wood didn't see fit to mention this forebear from which he borrows so much.
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