I had not intended to read James Wood's How Fiction Works, since I knew from some of his literary criticism in the New Yorker that our tastes in fiction do not much overlap. But there I was, standing before the cash register at Boswells, about to buy the book further down this page and looking at their table of impulse-y, mostly joke-y sorts of books. There, amid books of funny lists or zombified parodies, was a slight little thing whose title font recalled the early 60's Glass family books of J.D. Salinger. So, judging a book by its cover -- and with my wife and children waiting in the mini-van outside -- I bought the book.Wood's taste in fiction strikes me as rather stuffy and conservative -- his examples of good writing (or good fiction or good metaphors or good characterization) tend to the likes of Flaubert and Austen and George Eliot and the 19th century Russians. He's directly -- perhaps solely -- concerned with "realistic" genre-less literary fiction, a form which, Wood says, "schools its own truants" of "magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers." I suppose that, in literature as in high school, I hang with the truants. (It is a fair point, even so. As Newton showed, it is to action that we equally or oppositionally react.)
Wood explicates and examines "free indirect discourse," a third person narrational style that I first learned from John Gardner's Art of Fiction, and is able to demonstrate how this technique -- thought to be relatively modern -- creeps up in even the omnisciently-narrated 19th century novels he clearly reveres. Wood's book certainly crackles along and he effectively demonstrates what remains vital in the "classics," and I will say without qualification that I enjoyed his perspective.
Wood is clearly pre-Freudian in his tastes, and rightly mistrusts any characterization that is too psychologically apt. "Many of the most absorbing accounts of motive," he writes, "are studies in mystery." He draws upon Stephen Greenblatt's Will In the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare to demonstrate specifically removed explanation, cause, and rationale from his tragedies expressly to highlight their mystery. Despite clear answers in the source texts Shakespeare utilized in writing his plays, we never learn why Iago hates Othello, or what's really bugging Hamlet, or why Lear shuns his favorite daughter. The audience is left to guess and speculate, and this very lack of clear answers is what draws us to back to these works.
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Speaking of Shakespeare, here's Fool, a retelling of King Lear by the American comic author Christopher Moore. I had been reading about grisly murders in 2666, and then took up Jim Crace's Being Dead only to find that it, too, involved long and lovely descriptions of the scene of a brutal and random murder. I found myself hungry for something light, funny, and relatively corpse-less, and decided upon this book. (Yes, most of the cast is murdered, but not with the kind of Woodsian realism of Bolano and Crace.)I'd liked Moore's Lamb, a comedy that accounts for what John Prine has termed "Jesus: The Missing Years" but which also serves to spotlight the elements of eastern religions within the teachings of Christ, an approach that a pragmatic Unitarian like myself can truly dig. Fool doesn't carry the same kind of intellectual heft, but it's quite a lot of fun -- full of sex and deceipt, sly references to the works and words of Shakespeare, clever insults, and Python-like verbal mania.
There's only one page -- late in the novel -- that gets Tom Stoppardly post-modern, a nice sort of wink to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, without making too much of things. The language of the book nicely combines the elaborateness of Elizabethan stagecraft with modern American and British slang. It also lends King Lear a happy ending, in the manner of a Shakespearian comedy, rather than the usual bloodbath. (OK, so there's a bloodbath, too.)
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