Blame it on the marketing.  One feels bad to take pains to point it out, but there’s something audacious about titling your book How Fiction Works.  On the jacket of the deliberately 1930s throwback hardback edition, “Works” becomes “Works,” really getting to the meat of the issue.  The power of a good title is never to be underestimated.  A good title is the caption on the photograph, the lens through which the light refracts, the final framing of what a book is “about.”  Of such a tall order is “How Fiction Works” that one could argue that only James Wood, often cited as the greatest critic of our time, is up to the task. 

On the other, more serious hand, before anyone picks up this book they know its front-cover assertion is an exaggeration.  Wood is an acute formalist himself: what is the purpose of this distinct and hyperbolic formal gesture?  Wood is a marketable commodity — no small feat for a literary critic — but something about the title seems to come from the same place responsible for slews of books like Negotiate Your Way to Riches: How to Convince Others to Give You What You Want. Today’s culture demands totality, not just fragmentary glimpses of an unveiling truth, and it demands it in 248 pages with very large margins.  It’s telling that when E.M. Forster had roughly the same project in mind, his title was Aspects of the Novel.  Still, there are only aspects in Wood’s book, and there will always be merely aspects in any book of the sort: why have we been told otherwise?  Possibly for “zip.”

Beyond the commercial intent, perhaps there is a highbrow motive.  How to be a critic in the age of literary pluralism?  This is a time where new books of wildly different styles sit uncomfortably together on store bookshelves: it seems history is compressed, with no exit from the postmodern labyrinth.  Enough people believe us to be at the end of our literary history for it to be an inconvenience. How Fiction Works offers an alluring promise: its title says, “I will give you a unifying principle of fiction.”  If the attempt is going to be made, we feel it should be made wholeheartedly.  Much has been written about Wood’s tastes, sprung from the head of Flaubert and arriving in the twentieth century somewhere in the midst of Naipaul, Bellow, and Greene.  Wood is often criticized as “merely” an aesthetician, looking backward into the tradition of the 19th-century novel, but whatever his leanings are, he brings a serious, workmanlike attitude to reading fiction closely and attentively.

 Because this hands-on attitude is often very effective, nothing does greater disservice to the book than its title. Arranged into 123 tiny increments, the structure of the book immediately admits to the piecemeal way in which anyone would have to tackle a question as amorphous as the mechanics of fiction Wood himself notes initially, “when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character, and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.”  This is an admission both of the wild goose chase of making comprehensive statements about fiction as well as an acknowledgement of a particular aesthetic.  Each section segues right into the next, as if Wood were having a very illuminating ramble, and in reading it barely seems to matter that the book has been divided into sections about narration, detail, character, and so forth.  The same fertile earth is mined in each part. 

The heart of the book is Wood’s talent for close reading; it is the work’s clear strength.  Wood lucidly identifies several important techniques of prose fiction, and his practical observations often reap large dividends.  For instance, Wood’s approach is very good at a task like underlining when and why third person and first person narrations are used, and then incisively pointing out that unreliable narrators and omniscient narrators are not the absolute poles they might seem to be.  Wood’s observations are always practical and well-grounded, even if very occasionally verging on the banal: “The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.”

Jumping from topic to topic, the text runs from voice to detail, detail to character, and it becomes apparent that some topics are harder to tackle than others.  For instance, in trying to examine what makes a good detail in a work of fiction, Wood ends up dancing around the question.  He champions an abstraction taken from Hopkins — “thisness” — but instead of systematically homing in on what “thisness” might mean, Wood retreats from the abstract into an endless series of disparate examples.  First Conrad, then Pushkin, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Homer, and on to Henry James.  These are of course all good examples of writers who use detail to their advantage, but when it comes to outlining what in common makes them great, we’re left with the vague term “palpability” to string them together. The question is ducked and Wood moves on to a history lesson.  Of course details are palpable: a detail, being a narrowly-defined part of a larger object, is almost automatically specific.  If more than specificity is required for palpability, which seems possible, more than a chapter would have to be dedicated to answering the numerous ways that this is so.  Of course, the question is a paper tiger, and a reasonable person should have little hope of obtaining a comprehensive answer for it.  But the terms set by the book’s title noticeably underline the shortcoming.

Oddly, it is Roland Barthes, not Wood, who gives the most convincing answer to problems of detail in the novel.  Wood succinctly summarizes Barthes’ belief that the purpose of some mundane details in fiction is merely to signify realism itself and nothing more.  Wood accepts this idea in part, but goes on to dispute it, arguing that the object in question, a humble barometer sitting in a room of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, has significance within the context of the story’s universe.  Wood’s defense is noble, but it is ultimately at the root of why he has such a difficult time pinning down what makes a good detail: Barthes realizes that many fictional details are interchangeable and seeks to explain why that is so, while Wood reads in the opposite direction, trying to justify every detail by reading each one for meaning.  Wood finishes the passage by noting Barthes’ “sensitive, murderous hostility to realism,” a dismissal of Barthes as unqualified as the dismissal of Wood’s particular taste in fiction by others.

Most of Wood’s appraisals of the structuralist tradition, such as this, come off as tacking on modestly helpful caveats to what seem to be otherwise illuminating points.  This is in part because Wood is once again hampered by the self-imposed parameters of his own book.  What exactly, the reader asks, is the project of a book whose claims are so expansive and intellectual, but whose analysis is so down-to-earth and anecdotal?  Is it a book for laymen, or is it a book that seeks to enter into the dialogue of 20th-century criticism?  Is it possible to write a book for the “common reader” that still engages critically with Barthes and Shklovsky?  Wood displays his ill-defined intentions to bridge the gap in the preface: first he likens his book to Ruskin’s book on drawing, one for “the curious viewer, the ordinary art lover.” Barely a page later, he is on the offensive against Barthes and Shklovsky, calling them “specialists, writing for other specialists,” and claiming that his own book “conducts a sustained argument with them.”  But if Wood really wanted to take on Barthes, he would have probably needed much more room to develop an detailed argument than a book that has an introductory note reading, “Mindful of the common reader, I have tried to reduce what Joyce calls ‘the true scholastic stink’ to bearable levels.”  As distasteful as it might be to do, the whole of Barthes needs to be grappled with, not just a swipe here or there.

This mindfulness of the “common reader” turns itself back into the original aesthetic agenda that has become Wood’s calling card.  While it is unfair to say that Wood’s tastes are about looking into the past, he is as much at war with the radical authors of the second half of the twentieth century as the theorists.  Two of the relatively few negative comments Wood makes are pointed at Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, calling Wallace’s language in one story “hideously ugly” due to “the saturation of language by mass media.”  Wood suggests that Wallace needs free indirect style, which would counterbalance Wallace’s “debased” language with a narrative voice that would create perspective.  Here, Wood’s point seems off base.  Wallace’s turgidity is not a mark of linguistic banality.  It may be difficult and not classically beautiful, but it contains a high level of artifice that pushes it beyond ugly subject matter.

At the end of How Fiction Works, Wood tries to unify a book whose concepts are fundamentally shifting.  It’s a book that strives for a high-level critical discourse but is hampered at the same time by its populism and by its own ambitions.  It is a book that claims an immediate totality to its project, but one that is nevertheless forced — by the very nature of its project — to take things one part at a time.  Wood suggests that the realistic impulse is fundamental to all fiction, and not just one genre in the constellation of fiction.  However, the “evidence” that has come before hardly feels like proof of these points.  There is truth to this summation, but everything that came before seems detached from this idea, merely examples of how parts work as self-contained units.  At the end of How Fiction Works, it remains unknown how the fundamental wellspring of “the real” combines itself with artifice, producing this miraculous thing we call fiction.  It’s an enormous question, the kind of speculation that was the work of Barthes and company.

David Wallace ’11 is a three-hour movie of couples crying.