Fiction ... and why it matters

CATHERINE BUSH

HOW FICTION WORKSBy James WoodFarrar, Straus & Giroux,265 pages, $26.50Fiction can seem mysterious. The less of it we read, the more suspicious we may collectively become of it, perhaps because the world surrounds us with so many superficial simulacra without offering us regular opportunities for deep imagining through complex arrangements of words. Reading fiction is a weirdly intimate act: We take words into our heads and out of them create multidimensional people, set them in motion in time and space, empathize through them, animate a world. Current research shows that such imaginings can have the same neural effect on us as actually doing things. And then there's our response to the web of words themselves, to their precise and, with luck, zingy ordering.