Ken's Reviews > How Fiction Works

I thought this book would be written more with a writerly-slant, but no. More with a readerly-slant, turns out. Still, as a writer wading into novel-writing, you can pick up a thing or two. Up to you, I imagine Wood thinking. He's more about educating readers.

The good thing? This is mostly approached in layman's terms. It does not come across as high-falutin', ivory tower, show-off talk (that is, when authors have an audience of fellow professors in mind).

The other good thing? Wood uses so many excerpts by way of example, you will find yourself wanting to read some of the books he alludes to. For me that would be books like The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Saramago), Sabbath's Theater (Roth), Seize the Day (Bellow), The Waves (Woolf), The Rainbow (Lawrence), and Wittgenstein's Nephew (Bernhard) to name a few.

It's always embarrassing to see how not-so-well-read you are when you read books about reading, isn't it?

Anyway, the sections of the book give you an idea about where James Wood goes with this: "Narrating," "Flaubert and Modern Narrative," "Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur," "Detail," "Character," "A Brief History of Consciousness," "Sympathy and Complexity," "Language," "Dialogue," and "Truth, Convention, Realism."

The "Realism" discussion at the end is amusing. Nobody quite agrees on what is real, and many newer writers like to pile on and dis "realism" in very realistic ways.

Whatever. I leave that to the philosophers, who also disagree on what a chair is. This is, in the end, a book you'll enjoy if you like reading about reading. It's big print, it's fast, and it drops names and quotes like a baby drops food from the high chair.

What's not to like?