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James
Wood is probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking
world. After toiling at The New Republic for over ten
years, Wood made a surprise move to The New Yorker,
thus cementing his place in the pantheon of celebrated critics.
But what sometimes overshadows Wood's highly astute, analytical,
and often enthusiastic reviews are his unkind words for authors
who write in any style more modern than the modernists. It
was Wood who coined the derogatory term "hysterical realism"
to describe the works of authors like David Foster Wallace,
Thomas Pynchon, and Zadie Smith. It has been painfully obviously
that Wood prefers contemporary novels that hearken back to
Flaubert and Chekhov. The magazine n+1 accused Wood
of wanting to be his own grandpa. Wood is decidedly not a
hipster.
But don't
count Wood out. How Fiction Works has the potential
to change the way its readers read and write fiction. Think
of it as a high-level fiction class with a highly opinionated
and super-smart professor. Very early in How Fiction Works
Wood addresses his issues with contemporary authors like Wallace,
Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, and it's clear that he gets
what the authors are doing; he just doesn't like it.
In an
early chapter on what he calls the "unidentified free indirect
style," he briefly discusses Wallace's language in the short
story "The Suffering Channel." Reprinting a longish passage
written in what Wood calls "the ruined argot of Manhattan
media-speak," he accurately notes that the passage is written
from the point of view not of the main character, but "emanates
from a kind of 'village chorus'—it is an amalgam of the
kind of language we might expect this particular community
to speak if they were telling the story." Wallace's "village
chorus" technique is something rarely mentioned in reviews,
but it is a style he has employed throughout his career. Reviewers
have often complained that the POV and identity of Wallace's
narrators are vague—that's because the narrator is everyone.
Wood goes on to say, "In Wallace's case, the language of his
unidentified narration is hideously ugly, and rather painful
for more than a page or two."
Wallace,
Pynchon, and DeLillo rely on "a risky tautology inherent in…
contemporary writing: in order to evoke a debased language
(the debased language your character might use), you must
be willing to represent that mangled language in your text…
(Wallace's) fiction prosecutes an intense argument about the
decomposition of language in America, and he is not afraid
to decompose—and discompose—his own style in the
interests of making us live through this linguistic America
with him…Auden frames the general problem well in his poem
"The Novelist":.. the novelist must…'become the whole of boredom.'…Wallace
is very good at becoming the whole of boredom." Despite the
complete and utter diss, both of Wallace and of America patois,
it is clear that Wood understands Wallace in a way other contemporary
reviewers do not.
Wood
covers topics such as point of view, character, consciousness,
and the use of details, and he shows readers where these things
do and don't work, and why. He gives readers the tools necessary
to criticize any work, given time and close reading. Most
of his examples are from Saul Bellow and earlier, but since
he usually provides the text, knowledge of these authors is
not mandatory. His examples are always clear, and in some
cases he even re-writes passages to show readers in what ways
they wouldn't work.
Wood's
chapter on character is particularly strong, and here especially
he dispenses with the least subtle of the metafictionists
like John Barth, who constantly alerts the reader to the fact
that the characters are not real. Instead, Wood celebrates
the work of experimental writers like José Saramago
and Roberto Bolaño, who subtly draw readers into a
tricky game of deciding what is real and what isn't. Writing
about Saramago's novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo
Reis, where a pseudonym of an author continues to live
after the author dies, Wood shows how an author can bypass
metafiction's bluntness. "By starting with an invented character…
Saramago is able to pass through the same skepticism, but
in the opposite direction towards reality, toward the deepest
questions. Saramago asks, in effect: But what is 'just a character'?"
The book
itself is lovely. The page has a largish font with little
leading, giving the book a mid-century feel. The running heads
refer to the topics addressed on each spread and can be used
as navigation tools, making it easy to flip through and find
what is needed quickly. The jacket is printed on the reverse
rough side of the stock, adding to the old-timey feel. The
book should have had embossed cover materials and a stamp
on the front to complete the package, but this is the sort
of minutiae only hardcore bibliophiles will even notice.
Wood's
footnotes, which are asterisked, are occasionally irrelevant.
He quotes one particularly lovely passage from Stephen Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage, where ants march across the
face of a dead soldier, and the asterisk inexplicably calls
the ants a cliché of cinematic grammar, recalling Luis Buñuel's
Un Chien Andalou and David Lynch's Blue Velvet,
leaving readers wondering how cinematic grammar relates to
a pre-cinema novel. There is occasional interjection of the
personal detail, but those are fairly unobtrusive. He overuses
the word "you," which seems odd because he generally takes
on such a scholarly tone.
In How
Fiction Works, Wood has produced a contemporary classic.
Armed with examples and analysis that clearly explain what
does and what doesn't work in fiction, readers and writers
can go forth with these standards and apply them to any written
work, from Shakespeare to Palahniuk to one's own work. With
Wood's clear and well-organized writing, the ideas conveyed
will let readers read their favorites with fresh eyes and
perhaps allow them to appreciate previously unappreciated
works.
(September,
2008)
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