How Fiction Works by James Wood

If you miss the rigor and illumination of your best college professors, read James Wood's new book How Fiction Works. I loved it. A sample paragraph:

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him. There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him. Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all of this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.

Even better, but harder to reproduce here, are the sections where Wood dissects a passage from a great novel parsing it line by line for exquisitely delicate layers of meaning. After three chapters on narration, he tackles: Detail, Character, A Brief History of Consciousness, Sympathy and Complexity, Language, Dialogue, and ends with a chapter called Truth, Convention, Realism.

As with any dazzling professor, after the fireworks have faded you may find yourself arguing with Wood in your head. Although he uses Make Way for Ducklings and shreds John le Carré ("a clever coffin of dead conventions"), his canon is terribly old school. With so global a title, the book dismays by completely ignoring Africa (except Coetzee), South America (except Bolaño), and Asia (except Naipaul). Can Wood really convey how fiction works today without ever addressing the oceans of literature whose headwaters are Garcia Marquez or Achebe or Mahfouz or Mishima or Kawabata? He never mentions Toni Morrison, or examines the work of any black female writer, and his list of black male writers is Ralph Ellison, period.

No, I'm not for quotas; yes, I'm for breadth of human experience. And absolutely yes, I still think the book is essential. His examples prove again that great art is universal: The Bible, Cervantes, Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Conrad, Kafka, Mann, Mansfield, Hardy, James, Joyce, Woolf, Isherwood, Faulkner, Bellow, Pynchon, and Nabokov (with several gratifying nods to the summer book, Pnin). Get it.

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LA wants it. No. 74 in the queue list, 2 copies available