How Fiction Works | 
 enlarge | Author: James Wood
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 208
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0374173400
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.3
EAN: 9780374173401
ASIN: 0374173400
Publication Date: July 22, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Amazon.com
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 4 more reviews...
 The Cover is the Key August 18, 2008
The retro cover says it all. Farrar, Straus knew that it had the next big thing and that the next big thing consisted of a return to the best of the past. The book is receiving a great deal of attention, confirming their prescience.
How Fiction Works is a study of something that is very old-fashioned these days: craft. It is an examination of key elements of fiction and how they are most fully utilized by skilled writers. The vast majority of the writers examined here are canonical ones--another old-fashioned touch. The book is also cognizant of the nuances of narrative history and (a more modern touch) draws on popular culture for key insights. In short, this is a delightful, perceptive "book" book. First and foremost, it is an exceptional read. It is opinionated (though not abusive or flippant) and is a nice example of something that many modern students may never have seen before--judicial criticism. Frye famously argued that judicial criticism is passe, now that we realize that literary "quality" is like the stock market. Particular authors' "stock" rises and falls, depending on generational interests, so we should not concern ourselves with evaluative judgments. That is all very nice, except for the fact that reviewers, referees, acquisition editors and agents are forced to make evaluative judgments and in a world in which 800,000 books are published annually, readers seek help and advice from putative experts.
The book takes part of its inspiration from E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, an interesting little book that has enjoyed some influence. How Fiction Works goes well beyond Forster (sometimes on issues which Forster is associated with specifically, e.g., the distinction between `flat' and `round' characters). This is a book for both critics and practitioners. It wears its erudition lightly, in the English mode, but its thoughts are often weighty and its insights acute (e.g. the notion that the French are suspicious of realism because of the function of the preterite in their language).
The book is a must read for teachers and students of narrative, both for the importance of its arguments and for its function as an exemplar of what once functioned as "criticism" and might so function once again.
 A terrific reference -- August 15, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
If you write, let's hope you do massive amounts of reading good literature. If you are a reader of substance, James Woods' book will edify your intellectual and emotional connection to what you have already learned, albiet subconsciously. All the devices are there, the silliness, the overworked metaphors, the sly styles, the magic. He is obviously a fan of Flaubert at whose feet Woods lays much credit for today's (good) writing. In fact, it's nearly an homage. So many great books are referenced, referred to, excerpted -- it makes you want to go back and re-read them all in order to see the work with a clearer vision. What we enjoyed as plain old storytelling, Woods shows us is hardly random and not without great intellectual and artistic effort. Woods compares great writers (old and new) to each other showing us flaws and greatness in each of them.
Highly recommended for readers and writers.
 A Literary Critic Who Doesn't Resort to Snobbery August 12, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I was delighted that James Wood didn't take a condescending attitude about his subject. He doesn't say this is how it should be, but this is how it is and here is why. At first I didn't understand what the hell he was talking about, but somewhere during the second essay I adjusted to his style, became acclimated if you will, and I ended up getting a lot out of it. His examination of language in fiction was my favorite part.
I recommend this for anyone who appreciates an analytical approach to writing technique. This is not a how-to, however. Rather, it is more of a commentary.
 As Impenetrable as the Fiction Referenced August 11, 2008
18 out of 41 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
18 out of 20 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.
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