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How Fiction Works | 
| Author: James Wood
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
Buy New: $16.32
You Save: $7.68 (32%)
Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 1344
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0374173400
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.3
EAN: 9780374173401
Publication Date: July 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: The first thing you'll notice about How Fiction Works is its size. At 252 pages, it's a marvel of economy for a book that asks such a huge question and right away you'll want to know (as you might at the start of a new novel) what the author has in store. James Wood takes only his own bookshelves as his literary terrain for this study, and that in itself is the most delightful gift: he joins his audience as a reader, citing his chosen texts judiciously--ranging from Henry James (from whom he takes the best epigraph to a book I've ever read) to Nabokov, Joyce, Updike, and more--to explore not just how fiction works, mechanically speaking, but to reflect on how a novelist's choices make us feel that a novel ultimately works ... or doesn't. Wood remarks that you have to "read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it." His terrific bibliography will surely be a boon to anyone's education, but it's his masterful writing that you'll want to keep reading over the course of your life. --Anne Bartholomew
Product Description
What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 The Magician's Secrets July 22, 2008
71 out of 79 found this review helpful
James Wood conducts a concise but edifying tour behind the curtain of novel making, aimed primarily at the student and interested layperson. He examines the techniques used by the novelist that readers routinely take for granted. By spotlighting and defamiliarizing them, he demonstrates how they have evolved over the centuries, including examples of both good and bad usage.
Topics include free indirect style, the conciousness of characters, reality in fiction, successful use of metaphor and simile, different registers of tone, among others.
One of his most interesting discussions is on characters: how have different writers approached creating characters, including a history of critical responses to those approaches.
This is typical of Wood's modus operandi: take a basic component of novel writing and examine the assumptions we make as readers in order to understand and use what we are reading; what are the conventions writers and readers have evolved, and how did they come into being. Wood's style here is mostly shorn of the metaphors that illuminate his prior collections of criticism; the writing is invariably clear and succinct.
My only disappointment was in his episodic inability to refrain from revealing key plot points (i.e. Anna and the train) that may diminish the pleasure for future readers.
This is the best book I know to make one a more observant and appreciative reader.
 As Impenetrable as the Fiction Referenced August 11, 2008
66 out of 108 found this review helpful
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? August 10, 2008
57 out of 75 found this review helpful
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 August 4, 2008
52 out of 67 found this review helpful
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.
Just Dazzling July 25, 2008
12 out of 24 found this review helpful
This is a dazzling guide to how the mechanisms of the novel originated and developed. It is an exemplary model of how to correlate style and subject matter. It offers inspiration to the novelist and a refreshed sense that fiction matters to those of us who just enjoy reading novels. The book is filled with fascinating insights. I found Wood's illustration of how Flaubert in French is so much more stylistically brilliant than even his best translators can suggest to be particularly illuminating and valuable. This book will make us all better readers.
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