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?
