James Wood's 'How Fiction Works': refreshingly concrete
The New Yorker book critic draws on the banal and the abstract to explain what he looks for in literature
By Rebecca Markovits
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, July 20, 2008
I can remember almost exactly the moment I decided to drop out of graduate school and join the only occupation less lucrative than being a graduate student: freelance book reviewing.
The professor in my postmodernism seminar, a large, sloping man, mildly renowned, with a long muddle of pure white hair and an intentional air of imbecility, asked us all: "Are you one, or are you many?"
The facility with which the question was asked and understood annoyed me — surely it was nonsense?
But one by one my fellow academic aspirants answered, with serious mien, that he or she was many. I looked nervously behind me ... where were all the others?
There are, of course, many valid and important ideas raised by postmodernism: healthy skepticism about objectivity, doubt about the reliability of narratives, powerful evocations of the language-and-media-crazed modern world. But many postmodernists tend toward deliberate absurdity, their philosophy reduced to the pat claim that no one can formulate a consistent argument or opinion about anything. This has left much of the literary academy in a state of ironic limbo, in which various theories, increasingly detached from the book at hand (about which, after all, nothing can be said), replace any form of aesthetic judgment — that is, judgments that try to answer the question, "Does this work, and why?"
For me, reviewing offered a way back to the page.
Enter "How Fiction Works," the first book-length critique by James Wood, the chief book reviewer of The New Yorker, who is widely regarded as our preeminent literary critic. (Though others, annoyed by his old-fashioned tastes, might substitute pretension for preeminence.) Throughout his writing, Wood takes on the question of "Does this work?" with gusto. If reviews, as Byron would have it, paraphrasing Shakespeare, are the "paper bullets of the brain," Wood always packs heat and can take deadly aim.
In "How Fiction Works," he confronts his personal version of the canon, telling us "I have used only the books ... at hand in my study." At the same time, he confronts the postmodern assault on fiction's ability to represent reality. "If this book has a larger argument," he tells us, "it is that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.
"Fiction," he writes, borrowing from the critic Brigid Lowe, "does not ask us to believe things (in a philosophical sense) but to imagine them, (in an artistic sense)." At least to a young fogey like myself, this direct defense of the resilience of realism is extremely attractive.
Wood pairs such "larger arguments" with refreshingly concrete discussions. Though he will grapple with a novel's thematic material, Wood seems to prefer taking apart a book's artistic machinery and, so to speak, cleaning the pieces before he puts them back together again: Here is how an author uses indirect address well and badly; here are some conflicts such narration might present to the writer; here is how they may be resolved; here is the place where an author has pushed a character to act well out of character. Wood performs this procedure with a great deal of skill and insight, even if we sometimes feel his discoveries aren't quite as important as he thinks they are.
Wood's standards, which apply most comfortably to realism, are a curious mix of the banal and the abstract. On the one hand, he always asks, Would this character think, speak, act in this way? On the other hand, he asks, less tangibly, Does this novel move me?
Wood asserts that to successfully evoke a fictional world, a writer must conjure "thisness." It's a very Woodsian word, at once self-consciously casual and willfully nebulous. It embodies the idea that the common sensitive reader can handle theory.
Wood defines "thisness" for us: "any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concreteness." This sounds very good: "puff of palpability" is just the sort of pleasing phrase Wood enjoys indulging in, to the great advantage of his writing. The definition nicely conjures up the almost physical gravitational pull a well-placed word or image can have — the way it can curve our understanding of a passage around itself.
In such explanatory moments, Wood moves adeptly from the vague to the familiar; he understands that sometimes one must describe an elusive idea elusively in order to communicate what one means.
But sometimes Wood's phrases are not as evocative of his meaning as he would like them to be. All the impressive talk of "thisness" (later still, he adds "lifeness" to describe pretty much the same thing) seems in the end to describe no more than a specificity of detail that can seem, to a certain reader in a certain moment, right and familiar (the color "Kendal green" in Shakespeare, a mention of Queen Victoria's birthday in Joyce). One can't help feeling Wood has slightly overplayed his hand.
At the other extreme, Wood's theoretical ambitions lead to daunting terminology, such as references to a protagonist's "metaphysical presence" or "characterological relativity." These are perhaps just fancy words for a character seeming "real" (in the first instance) or "complex" (in the second). But those are the kinds of words that Wood can't seem to let sit on their own; he wants to make them subtler, hinting at deeper wisdoms.
But at his best moments, and there are many, Wood is simply a supremely writerly reader, at once exceptionally intelligent and pleasingly accessible. He can make a point seem recognizable and at the same time freshly illuminating, such as when he notes that caricature, while generally uninteresting, "sometimes might just be a novelist's way of sticking to the point," or argues that "in Flaubert and his successors we have the sense that the ideal of writing is a procession of details, a necklace of noticings, and that this is sometimes an obstruction to seeing, not an aid."
Of course all this criticism about style reveals that Wood's greatest interest is in the aesthetics of fiction. He says we should read with an interest in the art of writing. This can lead to exclamatory overemphasis. "How Fiction Works" is studded with little exclamations such as "How fine that is," and "Aren't these exactly the best words in the best order?" And the phrases he latches onto with such swooning enthusiasm will not move all readers equally. I confess I couldn't find the wonder he discerned in Saul Bellow's description of "the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency" at the end of a cigar. He values, perhaps, certain kinds of beauty in writing, certain dictive perfection, too highly.
But Wood's voice is personal enough that such statements are gently qualified because they can be traced back to an individual reader — Wood himself, who doesn't shy away from references to his personal "taste." And he recognizes the role that such taste plays in a reader's response to a novel: that pretty writing, or a lovable character, are easier for a reader to praise than less palpable accomplishments — thematic refinement, say, or narrative invention. "Almost every novelist will at some point be baselessly acclaimed for writing 'beautifully' as almost all flowers are at some point acclaimed for smelling nice," he admits (though not with his own reviews in mind).
Mostly, by producing what he calls "writer's criticism," Wood is holding up his end of what he hopes is a mutually productive conversation between novelist and reviewer. Thus he is often at his most impressive when pointing to the flaws in those writers he most admires, such as when he accuses Vladimir Nabokov of having "poorish eyes" for "beauties that are not visual at all," or Henry James of "telling and not showing."
He's even fiercer with living writers. (He once responded to Jay MacInerny's comment that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would make it difficult for him to go back to his novel by calling this "the one good outcome of the terrorist horror.") An Englishman writing in the United States, Wood is engaged in a long argument about the current state of American fiction. He coined the phrase "hysterical realism," now widely used, to describe the kind of grand, rushing, hyperactive novel, filled with plot and subplot, that dominates today's literary fiction scene. The combination of "topicality, relevance, reportage, social comment, preachy presentism, and sidewalk-smarts" that makes for contemporary realism threatens the subtlety Wood values so highly in fiction.
If Walt Whitman called America "the greatest poem," Wood argues, "then America may represent a mimetic danger to the writer, the bloating of one's own poem with that rival poem, America." This tendency to include everything is what Auden called the novelist's need to "become the whole of boredom." "David Foster Wallace," writes Wood, "is very good at becoming the whole of boredom." Sometimes paper bullets hurt.
