This week has been a bit Wood-focused but I’m sure this will be the last such post. The New York Times has a review up today, though, of How Fiction Works that is generally sympathetic to my own view. In fact, it even makes the same allusion at one point:
Take his disquisition on detail, which comes down first to asserting its importance, then to questioning its all-importance, and then, after serving up a list of some of his very favorite fictional details, to defining the apt, exquisite detail much as a judge once defined obscenity: as something he knows when he sees it.
Walter Kirn seems to have the same ideas about Wood’s prescribing realism as everyone else does, too:
His essential point is this: Novels and short stories succeed or fail according to their capacity (a capacity that has progressed over the centuries rather like the march of science) to represent, affectingly and credibly, the actual workings of the human mind as it interacts with the real world.
That sentence is, I think, an excellent summation of much of the work.
On Why Writers Write and Why Readers Read (ignored by Wood, as Ducks and Drakes so well pointed out):
For him, that matter seems settled. They do it to perfect the union of Wood’s vaunted “artifice and verisimilitude,” two virtues he treats as though carved on a stone tablet, and thereby to promote the cause of civilization; not, as is so frequently the case outside the leathery environs of the private library, to escape the constrictions of civilization, redraw its boundaries, decalcify its customs, or revive the writer’s or reader’s own spirits by dancing on its debris.
It’s a very good review. The Times’ Paper Cuts blog on Wood here and here, as well.
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