How Fiction Works by James Wood

James Wood has been accused in several places (including here) of prescriptivism in his recent book, How Fiction Works. He has denied the charge, but some of its truth lingers.

Most of How Fiction Works is an explanation of just that—Wood has written, allegedly for “the common reader,” an account of everything from narrative through detail and character to language. Of course, it’s highly debatable whether the common reader will be interested in the inner workings of fiction.

But for those who enjoy unweaving the rainbow, the book is extremely accessible and just about all of Wood’s close readings are rewarding. It begins to grate a little how much of the book is an ode to Flaubert, especially when it leads Wood to say completely foolish things about the English and French languages (English is but French’s wan cousin; Barthes couldn’t understand realism because of the passé simple), but this is forgivable. The unpacking of a single sentence from Sabbath’s Theater is delicious, and the analysis of Raskolnikov’s psychology excellent. And the entire chapter on language is very clear and well-done, though some of those common readers may be less taken with Wood’s tastes. He rightly disdains the all-too-common complaint that characters are often not “likable,” and has hardly anything to say about plot, except that the use of it to drive a novel is a cheap and low technique.

And after all this enlightening descriptive account of what goes on between the lines of realist fiction, Wood comes to his last chapter, “Truth, Convention, Realism,” where he finishes his argument that “fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude.” To charges of prescriptivism, he has responded:

my new book is precisely not a prescriptive guide to writing one kind of book (it praises the novel as the virtuoso of exceptionalism); it is precisely not a defense of ‘the high realist novel,’ whatever that is (the chapter on character defends a postmodern idea of a kind of ‘character of gaps’); and to say that I champion the fiction of character and dialogue over ‘stylistic flourishes’ is almost the opposite of the truth. As almost every word of criticism I have ever written attests, I pay the greatest attention to ‘stylistic flourishes,’ examine them, and revel joyfully in them. They are everything.

All of this is true, unarguably so, based on a reading of How Fiction Works. But all the same, certain things are roundly condemned: aestheticism (though Wood could be accused of this himself), any nonmimetic account of fiction (à la Barthes and Gass—whom he seems at times to misconstrue), “commercial realism,” meaningless detail (but not detail that brings “lifeness” to a work), suspense, and dead convention. Certainly there is bad writing in the world, but not everything excluded from Wood’s account of fiction falls into that category, and some complaints are based on distaste for large swathes of fiction (e.g., most postmodernism) while others seem to be of the “I know it when I see it” variety (e.g., Updike is condemned for “writing over” his character, while Bellow is specifically praised despite doing the same). He may not encourage “one type of book,” but he certainly propounds a view that realism is not “a genre” but “a central convention in fiction-making”—and by “a central convention” he does seems to imply that it’s the only really worthwhile one.