HOW FICTION WORKS.

Huang, Lily

HOW FICTION WORKS by James Wood

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, $24.00 cloth, ISBN 9780374173401

Robert Pinsky wrote a small book of prose some years ago about reading poetry. It was not an ambitious book: it showed you examples of verse and told you to read them. It was not much concerned with what the poems were about but rather with how they sounded, and that simple premise--listen to this--was more illuminating than any volume in the vast secondary literature about poetry. The poems sounded new, and if they were not much explained or thrust into contexts, they imparted other things--they were felt. Hearing them, seeing them bare on the page, you experienced something that did not beg to be explained--a sense of perfection, but one that contained no definite properties. This, you realized, must be what the poet feels, which was not a baseless conjecture since a poet, after all, was telling you.

A critic, now, is telling it too. But James Wood has a bigger task than Robert Pinsky, because fiction has at once more claimants and more skeptics, and when the novel is not being put upon to give substance to a theory, it is being put upon to defend its existence. So How Fiction Works is more loaded than The Sounds of Poetry because Wood can't show fiction without also speaking for it, against the doubters as well as the diluters--without writing the parallel thesis, "What Fiction Is." This sounds elementary, but it's why Wood is so effective: he asks the simple, large questions and only lets fiction answer. Unlike more complicated theorists, he doesn't need to erect a dizzying system of scaffolding in order to see the original spire.

Running through How Fiction Works is a narrative about narrative, a tradition borne along, tailored, embellished, and remade by Wood's favorite writers: Austen, Tolstoy, James, and Spark, among others, but none more than Flaubert. (A few writers, generally thought to be part of the lineage, are politely disinherited.) This may be only one version of the truth, but the possibility of alternate histories does not diminish the book. What's important is not how Wood lines up his brilliant cast but what he reveals of their work: the detail in Flaubert, Austen's innocent free indirect style, the authenticity of Chekhov. These haven't been surpassed, but--judging by the later writers Wood firmly excludes from the pantheon--they seem to be often forgotten.

Most writers are fluent: their sentences flow easily, sometimes abundantly. They can create verbal water slides but not worlds, not people, not truths. What Wood prizes in writers is not fluency but supreme discretion--the ability to see and make choices, so large that it shapes the entire narrative voice, or so fine that the reader wouldn't believe that a choice were possible, so seamlessly does the adjustment become the reality of the work. "We no longer notice," writes Wood, "what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness." When Professor Pnin, doing the dishes, loses his grip on a soapy nutcracker, Nabokov writes that the "leggy thing" drops into the sink. Wood revels in this: for the distracted, unhappy Pnin, a "leggy thing" is exactly what the nutcracker is. Nabokov has made a choice on the scale of a nutcracker, but the precision of it makes the whole sentence ring.

Delight is not an experience often ascribed to literary critics; for Wood, it's the whole interest of the game. Most critics endeavor to say things about literature, but Wood wants to reach the point where he cannot say anything more. The "leggy thing"; the "huddled grave" visited by little Maisie Farange; the "apparatus of happiness" that Mrs. Elton assembles for herself in Emma, the man "joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith" in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie--one reads, Wood seems to say, in order to get to these moments. They are the apotheosis of the best tenets of narrative: the subversive flow of free indirect style, luminous metaphor, exactness of image, character, and feeling all achieved through the exactness of language. Fiction "works" in these moments, and it is the only thing that strikes the singular note. What more can Wood say? Not much--so he exalts and cedes the stage: "What a piece of writing this is! What an amazing opening! Isn't this the best description you've ever read ...aren't these exactly the best words in the best order?" And aren't these exactly the best words for a critic to say, as a last happy gesture, when he knows his work is done?

It is in not saying, in not attempting to explain, that Wood taps into a quality of fiction lost on so many critics: the sense of richness in shadow, the felt but unseen dimensions of a detail or character. Wood writes of characters who are "somehow very private, even as they artlessly expose themselves." Think of Alexei Karenin, Charles Bovary, Edward Casaubon, these are people we more or less get. Yet they are not at all transparent, and it's that "more or less" that makes them so interesting, that gives them their particular yet indeterminate pathos. They say ridiculous things, but their very ridiculousness is unfathomable. There is no help for them precisely because we don't know why they are the way they are. And what we don't know about them is quite as much part of the truth of these characters as what we see and hear of them; Wood, in acknowledging this, is really recognizing the profound life of these people.

One of his favorite moments in Chekhov occurs in "The Lady With the Little Dog." Gurov and Anna, both married to other people, are spending their first afternoon in Anna's hotel room. While Anna sits subdued by guilt, Gurov calmly eats a slice of watermelon. This is just one of many details in the story, writes Wood, "that refuse to explain themselves." These words are doubly telling: Wood looks to the writing alone to explain itself, not to some external idea; and he declares that not knowing is part of the experience of reading, is quite right--is okay. These kinds of details, he writes, "denote precisely the inexplicable ... the category of the irrelevant or inexplicable (that) exists in life." That's a fine statement, except for being couched in the standard language of critics.

The idea of a detail "denoting" anything carries a sense of stagecraft that the best fiction--as Wood himself shows--has no place for. And it is this way of thinking that lays fiction open to the critic's critics--the likes of Roland Barthes--who, unable to accept that a detail can exist for no reason, would think of all detail as the cheap, easily exchanged currency of meaning. It must stand for something, or it must stand for nothing--it cannot simply be. This, as Wood would agree, is a completely faithless way to read, and no way at all to write. Any number of details would meet the purpose of signifying--well, you name it--Mr. Collins's awkwardness, Aunt Norris's pettiness, even the meaningless-ness of a little moment in Chekhov--that is, if fiction were an exercise in signifying things. It's not. And when confronted with this cheeky heresy, from Barthes to William Gass, Wood writes gravely, "I find this deeply, incorrigibly wrong."

To think that one detail can be readily supplanted by another dismisses the writer's choice; to say that Flaubert didn't think too much about it, he simply plucked one detail out of many, is to deny everything in fiction that makes a critic like James Wood rejoice. If it is possible to read A Simple Heart or What Maisie Knew and see nothing but signifiers--well, then the real question is, do these people even like fiction? For clearly these kinds of readers are immune to the writing; fiction doesn't work on them. Not for an instant do they gain purchase on the world of the narrative and feel the rightness of details, the truth of the characters--or if they did, they don't think feelings are very important. So, untouched by metaphor, they create a certain remove, put up a bunch of signs to warn passersby--signifier! mimesis!--and write many books.

Meanwhile, James Wood moves from one rapture to another, trying to characterize that sense of perfection, that profound satisfaction awakened by the right words in the right order. "I am consumed by this sentence," he writes of some words of Marilynne Robinson's, "partly because I cannot quite explain why it moves me so much." Gurov's watermelon, he decides, is "studiedly irrelevant," a deliberate spark of surplus, as when "you wastefully leave lights on in your home when you aren't there, not to prove that you exist, but because the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive." Of course, in fiction, which light you leave on matters a great deal--it changes the way the room is illuminated.

Writers know this; for them detail, effect, feeling, truth have always been implicated together. A book like Wood's, which "asks a critic's questions and offers a writer's answers," is an attempt to bring that long-running, sometimes distant conversation among writers closer to bear. For these are a writer's questions, too--and if they're not asked outright, it's because they're all over the fiction.