How Fiction Works by James Wood (2018)

One of my favorite books on the subject of fiction (a few others are listed at the end). Not how to write a novel, but more focused on how to read them. He doesn’t say much about plot because whatever it is, the magic in fiction is how a good author embeds us in the story. This book is about the linguistic tricks (if you will) that form the technical structure of that embedding. 

For example, in his chapter on character, we learn that Wood is not so enamored of distinctions like “round” and “flat” characters. Both can be important to the story, and importantly, some of the flat ones turn out to be highly memorable, while character rounding, as it has evolved from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, has changed markedly. A modern author writing like Balzac or Eliot sounds hackneyed, imitative, “overdone.” But the modern has the advantage that, once the long form of character has been articulated and the technique becomes well known, the modern author can use evolved and much shorter techniques to invoke a fully rounded character (or environment); or as Thomas Hardy wrote (Tess of the d’Ubervilles 1891) “…we wander the long paths many times to discover the short ones” (my paraphrase)

This works for other aspects of what is called “realism” as well. All of modern genre fiction, from romance to action-adventure, mystery, and so on, is made possible by reference to this history. Wood points this out in his last chapter. Is realism in literature real? Not in the sense that it encompasses all of reality. Yet there is truth in it. The art (and this is true of all fine art) is arranged so that what it reveals of reality enhances whatever truth—insight—the artist wants to convey.

There are chapters on narration, detail, form (organization), language, character development, dialogue, and consciousness in literature—the invention and evolution of “free indirect discourse” being, in Wood’s opinion, the keystone in the development of the modern novel. Many, many authors are referenced, some of whom I’ve read, a few I’ve never heard of. There are two chapters focused on Flaubert (1821-1880), the lynchpin of “realism”, with supporting reference to Austin, Eliot, and Balzac, and more. How these nineteenth-century developments transform in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels—with examples—is also addressed

How Fiction Works is a well-crafted examination of how to read a novel and appreciate the literary mechanisms behind the magic. I first read this book six or seven years ago, having never read (other than Shakespeare) any of the canonical authors mentioned. This review is based on a re-read after having read at least one novel from many of them.

Here are a few other books on structure in fiction:

How to Read Novels like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2008) 

How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2005). This one is mostly about symbolism.

Aspects of the Novel (E. M. Forester 1927)

The Writing of Fiction (Edith Wharton 1925)