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Literary Review
ENDPAPER
An aesthetician’s ideology
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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James Wood, unalienated from the creative instinct, offers us rare insights in How Fiction Works.
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Delighting in wordcraft: James Wood
I had said in this column once that, “Michael Dirda has been America’s most engaging, energetic book critic.” A few days later Amitava Kumar emailed me to say, “I disagree slightly with your assessment of Dirda; I’d give that honour to the Bitish-born, New York-based James Wood, who pushes up the stakes in this business like nobody else. Unlike Dirda, his readings of someone like Updike is demanding and to my mind utterly persuasive. I’d like to argue a bit more strenuously in favour of Wood.” I wrote back saying I wholeheartedly agreed with him. And that like so many (Pico Iyer considers Wood one of his literary heroes) I, too, had enjoyed and admired Wood’s first collection of essays on literature and belief, The Broken Estate, which he had published when he was only 33. It’s just that I hadn’t known he had moved to America and had been writing from there.
I had hoped then that I might get another chance to write about Wood, and I now have it with the publication of his new book, How Fiction Works. This is the first truly illuminating book on the craft of a writer I have read. Writers making a start and writers well into their craft will learn nearly everything there is to learn about writing good fiction from Wood’s deep responses to the writers he so clearly knows and loves. Apart from Wood’s own brilliant commentary and remarks, there are phrases, sentences, and entire paragraphs here from the novels that he knows intimately that define imaginative sympathy, style, detail, endings, and dialogue in the most vivid and glorious ways. Wood feels academic criticism and literary theory have not answered these questions well, and his book poses these “theoretical questions but answers them practically…asks a critic’s questions and offers a writer’s answers.”
Varied detail
Take the chapter titled “Details”, where he notes that life is so full of amorphous details, we fail to notice them. But literature teaches us to notice the right details. But how do we know when a detail seems really true? And what constitutes a fictional detail, anyway? I had always felt a little guilty that I have never been able to relish the rich style and visual detail of authors such as Updike and Nabokov. Wood is the first critic to reassure me (and other readers who feel like me) that I may be on to something. “There are beauties that are not visual at all, and Nabokov has poorish eyes for those,” writes Wood. Nabokov, he tells us, complained once that Henry James wasn’t visually alert. But what Nabokov failed to notice, points out Wood, is that James’ “notion of what constitutes a detail is more various, more impalpable, and finally more metaphysical than Nabokov’s.” Brilliant, don’t you think? How often we forget that in both, life and books, there are details more various than the eye can ever know or take in.
Like a good detective story, How Fiction Works investigates just how a piece of prose works to bring off its effects. Wood says the book is not just for writers and readers but for “anyone interested in what happens on the page.” Theorists have criticised Wood for his “narrow aesthetician’s interests”. Like Harold Bloom, Wood has always (unfashionably) stuck up for an aesthetic approach to studying literature instead of ideologically driven readings. In this book, Wood once again endorses his faith in practice over theory. For him the deconstructive critics are “alienated from creative instinct” and seem to possess little love for literature. How Fiction Works instructs the initiated and the common reader on the craft of a novelist (“the incisive, beautifully turned workings of a literary mind”) without the intrusion of post-modern literary theory.
The book belongs to a critical subgenre quickly developing — a handful of books attempting a philosophy of the novel. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (which Wood feels is imprecise now) Alfred Kazin’s The Bright Book of Life (Kazin’s definition of the novel, borrowed from Lawrence, as the “one bright book of life” is still to be beaten) and Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel come quickly to mind. Recent additions to this genre of a literary user’s manual are Ruth Padel’s Fifty Two Ways to Read a Poem, John Sutherland’s The Novel: A User’s Guide, John Mullan’s How Novels Work and Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.
Delightful
Wood’s favourite authors are Woolf, Bellow, Austen, James, Melville, Gogol, Chekhov, Naipaul, and W.G. Sebald. He records the delight he takes in their prose exuberantly, noting often, “What a piece of writing that is”, or “I am consumed by this sentence”. In response to a Bellow description of a plane taking off, he writes, “Until this moment one was comparatively inarticulate, until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence.” Let me list a few more sentences of Wood I relished: “We begin in misplaced certainty and end in placeless mystery.” “I am thicketed in qualifications.” “Nearly all of Muriel Spark’s novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved.”
“The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.” And finally, “The novel itself teaches us how to read its narrator.” The only thing I missed in the book was James Wood on recent fiction. How exciting it would be to have this passionately engaged critic bring us closer to the great genre writers and instruct us on the pleasures of their craft.
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