Marathon

I just got around to reading James Wood’s odd little book, How Fiction Works, which is all over the place nowadays. Blogs, buses, book clubs, everywhere.

My notes here are not intended as a review. Suffice it to say that this book is an enjoyable light study on modern literature full of smart sentences and splendid paragraphs. Examples are successfully illustrative and unexpectedly apt – he gets surprising mileage out of V. S. Naipaul – and some extended passages are likewise insightful. I especially recommend the “Brief History of Consciousnes” chapter, in which Wood makes a succinct historical argument about soliloquy.

That said, I am intrigued by some questionable choices that Wood made before he set forth his passages, splendid and pithy though they be. I’m curious about the book’s sense of its own purpose, as cued by the topics that the author chose to exclude from the frame for this study of fiction in general and the novel in particular. Of course, no book can do everything, and people obviously have to make hard choices prior to putting pen to paper. I’m just not sure that the decisions that Wood made are ideal to achieve the fullness to which the project aspires.

For instance, consider the main subjects that Wood discusses – narration, description, Flaubert, characters, reading, language and realism. The list is orthodox, and takes us through issues often raised by writers themselves (Henry James, E. M. Forster) and also by literary critics (Wayne Booth, Eric Auerbach). But I’m puzzled that the book does not contain a focused discussion of action, plot or story, the sorts of questions that animated readers from Aristotle to Northrop Frye. The book spends time philosophizing about the difference between a person and a character, yet has nothing to say about how events concatenate across a storyline, how conflicts and resolutions are organized – all the things that answer the question “what happens?” – and so Wood has omitted the work that takes place to get characters from one state of affairs to another.

It is as if the book is training us to race, but will not say how long the track is, how it will bend and weave, how the terrain will change. Without these details, it’s hard to pace ourselves through the marathon that is the modern novel.

Moreover, by omitting story and action, there’s no sense of the novel as a large configuration of language in which words happen across a certain span of pages. Without explicating the novel’s major problems of expectation management and design – suspense, surprise, pause, conflict, climax, beginnings, middles and ends – the reader has little sense of the real value of Wood’s recommendations. For instance, unless we know what a story is about and how the novel relates it, it is hard to see why Wood’s “free indirect style” is such an excellent tool to help tell stories in novels. To put it another way, How Fiction Works does not treat the novel as a finished self-complete undertaking – as a work – and so we will necessarily have a hard time judging what literary labors best make it up.

Finally, Wood’s book also exhibits startlingly little curiosity about how people use fiction to make meaning in their lives, how fiction works for them. Consider an anecdote that the author uses to motivate a passage on sympathy and mimesis. In the anecdote, Wood explains that a municipal leader in a rough-and-tumble section of Mexico City recently gave his police a reading list including Cervantes, Octavio Paz and Edgar Allan Poe. Police Chief Jorge Amador believed that reading would enrich his officers in three ways: by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary; by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy; and by providing an “ethical benefit.” Chief Amador explains,

Risking your life to save other people’s lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.

Now that’s a rich idea; indeed it is a whole philosophy about how real people believe that fiction works. It reminds me of another anecdote that Janice Radway wrote about in Reading the Romance. After asking a reader of romance novels what these books do well, Radway expected some analysis of the story. Instead, she got a reply about the effect of romances on the people who read them, as the respondent used the question to discuss the stresses in the lives and marriages of housewives that are both created and mitigated by reading. Radway’s story and Amador’s response ought to be a part of any discussion about how fiction works, because these stories remind us that this process is not hypothetical – fictions are working at every moment everywhere in the imaginative lives of real people who have perfectly relevant ideas about that very process itself.

Radway is chastened by the response, realizing that the meaning of reading is larger and more worldly than her literary critical background admits. She recognizes that this is a response to highlight, parse and learn from. But Wood completely brushes away Amador’s opinions about how fiction works, and uses a footnote to do so, as if to add insult to injury

We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on – because it is alive and we are alive.

Of course, that’s ridiculous. Turnips are also alive, and seldom read Proust. Besides, who is Wood to know why Amador or his officers read? In fact, even if Wood is right, that fact alone does not make Amador’s opinions irrelevant, because perceptions about fiction-at-work are surely just as significant as the essential traits that Wood in his wisdom imputes to the reading process. All mystifications become more important under scrutiny, not less so.

The deeper point is that just as Wood curiously ignores the work that takes place in a novel and the sense of the novel as a self-complete work, he also ignores what work people believe that fiction does in their lives, omissions that underestimate the novel and diminish How Fiction Works . At best, these problems make Wood’s mature reflections less deeply meditative than they might be; at worst, they exhibit a shoddily self-absorbed concept of fiction and a low sense of humility that tarnishes the book’s achievement.