I’ve been meaning for a while to say something about reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works, but so much has already been said, and it’s tough to boil down a response to some succint kernel.
One thing that did surprise me was that the “imperious” tone many critics spoke of — the one that had Walter Kirn getting behind on labels and describing Wood as “flash[ing] the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic” — really isn’t about his language or how prescriptive he’s being or any of the usual places you’d expect to locate such things. Wood makes a pretty friendly and enthusiastic case for how a lot of literature really does work, and provides loads of interesting readings along the way. What’s odd is that you’d expect Wood — widely read, a working critic, and actually younger than most — to be completely aware of all the other ways people approach reading and writing fiction. You’d expect that, at book length, he’d either have to grapple seriously with those approaches or just modestly submit that he’s talking about one major way fiction works, but fiction is big and complicated and one great lively thing about it is that someone always sees it differently. The weird “imperiousness” is that he doesn’t do this. He even manages to create the sense that he views different perspectives as foreign and faintly ridiculous; when he bothers discussing them, he summarizes them in ways that seem less like he’s caricaturing the opposition and more like he actually doesn’t get what they’re saying.
And in the end, I honestly can’t tell whether he knows this or not. He spends the totality of the book, for instance, making an unspoken background assumption that the primary purpose of fiction is to represent some kind of reality. It’s not until the final chapter that he acknowledges that — amazingly enough — there are plenty of writers and readers and critics of fiction who are not sure this is entirely the case. His response to this is funny: he reduces that argument to a few 60s academics and William Gasses and funny post-structuralists who allegedly think that fiction is purely a linguistic performance and has no strict relationship with reality. To which Wood, in a tone that would be almost charming if it weren’t so rhetorically feeble, says to the reader: C’mon, buddy! You and I, we both know that’s not really true. You read a book and it portrays something “really” happening, am I right? Buddy, c’mon. And then, even more amazingly, he does a sentimental little dance around this somewhat obvious and vaguely point-missing response — isn’t fiction great, the way it can draw reality like that? — as the curtain closes on the book as a whole.
It’s really kind of weird. It’s no mystery how it enraged so many readers. Which is too bad, because apart from that habit — as a sort of traditionalist spin through the basic techniques and issues of fiction, an incomplete one, a by-no-means-prescriptive one, just a scratch through the main ways Western fiction has operated — it’s pretty good. It’s just too bad it gives off that whiff it does: not really that of someone “imperious,” I don’t think, not that of a prescriptivist or stodgy polemicist or a tweedy blowhard with an upturned nose. It’s more like someone with limited social skills, like the IT guy so enthralled with computers that he’s not quite able to fathom the way other people actually use them, and is too deep in his own approach to really entirely hear when other people try to explain the alternatives.
What’s funny to me about the book is that its failings spring directly from the sort of technique Woods prizes above all others: a whittling, line-editing, sculptural effort toward neoclassical clarity. The fact that he doesn’t seriously address the other ways fiction works (linguistic ballet or otherwise) seems part and parcel of his craving for an elegant simplicity approaching some kind of antique golden ratio he dare not fully articulate. The fact that David Foster Wallace is a recurring aesthetic villain is, in Woods’ own words, because the man’s prose is “hideously ugly” (ha, speaking of that excessiveness Woods abhors—why not just “ugly”?) and too willing to inhabit the trashiness of language as it’s commonly mangled today. So much for creating reality. His precious ears can’t handle Wallace, meaning he treats fiction as a retreat from the tyranny of the garbage-tongued English-speaking world rather than a complex reflection of it, as he contends. In striving for a bit of essence, Woods shies away from and derides most complicating factors—that doesn’t make his analysis particularly shitty, it just makes think this work could be re-titled In Defense Of 19th Century Literature or John Updike Should’ve Known Better or Why I Like The Stuff I Like.
