News

Fiction 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.

James Wood's new volume of criticism, How Fiction Works, is his attempt to answer - perhaps to think through would be a better way of putting it - what he sees as the most pressing questions about the mysteries and mechanics of fiction.

• How Fiction Works, by James Wood, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 265 pages, $26.50

This isn't exactly a how-to guide, not a how-to-write guide, anyway, although writers can undoubtedly learn from it. And it's less mechanistic or comprehensive than its title suggests. It's relatively short, divided into 10 sections subdivided again into smaller numbered thought bytes; it's not introductory in tone but exemplary as a study, above all, in how to read, in how to engage deeply and passionately with fiction.

Wood, British born and raised, now literary critic at The New Yorker and the author of two previous books of criticism and a novel, is often described as the United States' pre-eminent literary critic. "In this book," he writes, "I try to ask some of the essential questions about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character? When do we recognize a brilliant use of detail in fiction? What is point of view, and how does it work? What is imaginative sympathy? Why does fiction move us?"

That first question offers a clue to Wood's deepest obsession, the one that, he acknowledges, underlies all his critical inquiry: What is realism? Or, how does fiction represent the world? For it is Wood's ardent belief that fiction does, and must, represent the world, if not in any prescribed way. Fiction also offers a kind of grammar of identity, he asserts, a way to recreate not only the world but human consciousness.

“ Wood himself is a subtle and exhilarating noticer ”

Fundamentally, Wood believes in fiction's referentiality: It is through its representational possibilities that fiction gains access to truth. This is why fiction matters. At the same time, he is quick to point out that fiction (created out of words) is artifice, and so a secondary line of questioning becomes: How do we reconnect "the technique of that artifice" to the world?

Wood often gets chided for being old-fashioned, although I don't think that a belief in the possibilities of fiction's referentiality or grappling with what this means is inherently old-fashioned. He is perhaps most suggestive, though, when looking backward, when describing, say, the development of consciousness - the expression of such subjectivity - in fiction.

In How Fiction Works, he makes a succinct case for Flaubert as the founder of "modern realist narrative." He roots in Flaubert the emergence of what he calls "free indirect style," or close-third-person point of view, in which the author delves into a character's interiority, accessing thought, subjective observation, diction, rhythms of speech. He also traces to Flaubert contemporary fiction's dependence on the telling detail to create vividness and a sense of veracity, the way it privileges noticing, making character, or narrator, in Wood's lovely phrase, "the author's porous scout."

Wood himself is a subtle and exhilarating noticer, especially when pursuing close readings of authors whose work he admires: Flaubert, Henry James, Saul Bellow. Fiction, he also argues, schools us in noticing, both as readers and writers. It demands attentiveness and makes us equally sharp observers of life. He charts the way writers (Flaubert, James and Bellow among them), navigate through this conundrum: If the author is really the one doing the noticing, and in fiction the noticing must come to us through character, how then do writers make this channelling convincing without turning every character into a writer or a preternaturally attentive individual?

Wood is also an advocate - for free indirect style, for the vitality of "flat" characters, an iconic term taken from E. M. Forster's 1927 study of fiction, Aspects of the Novel. Wood wants us to see things as he does. Reading him, I get a sense of fiction as a kind of field, perceptions in the foreground, consciousness extending behind. Depth of field is what interests him, an intensity of depth (temporal, spatial, psychological), rather than fiction as a realm of the kinetic, narrative defined through movement, movement as an agent for propulsion and transformation, which also means that he's less interested in characters' actions or their consequential working out in story or plot. (It is fascinating to compare Wood's analysis of detail in Flaubert - the selection of detail to create the texture of the real - to that of philosopher Elaine Scarry in Dreaming by the Book. Scarry is precisely interested in the issue of motion and how readers animate a kinetic, dimensional world in their heads.)

I almost wish that Wood had dispensed with some of his arguments. In setting up an opposition between himself and Forster, he misrepresents Forster's use of the terms "round" and "flat," I think. In Forster's view, a character can transition between the two, and Forster's roundedness has more to do with unpredictability, a character's potential for unpredictable action, while Wood uses the term to suggest depth, once again, and access to a character's consciousness, and pays less attention to what characters actually do.

I also wish that Wood, instead of rhetorically jousting with those who define realism differently, would just come out and say that it's a term people use to mean any number of things. By the end of this volume, Wood himself is shucking off the term in favour of "lifeness," with its inherent invocation of vitality rather than verisimilitude. What he wants from fiction is "life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry."

One of the deepest pleasures of reading Wood, beyond the strenuous engagement that his writing consistently demands, is to watch him grapple with his own ideas about realism, and to watch these shift as he renegotiates what he means. I wish he'd allow himself to chart this journey full on, in an unabashedly personal way. I'm not convinced that every fiction writer must share his belief in fiction's ultimate referentiality, but I respond to the complexity of what he's attempting to articulate and I admire his belief.

Catherine Bush is the author of the novel Claire's Head, and director of the creative writing MFA program at the University of Guelph. She is working on a novel titled The Thief.

Flaubert, father of modern fiction

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 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.

From How Fiction Works