How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Cape £12.99, 194 pages
FT bookshop price: £10.39

There’s a lot of toolkit-lit-crit around nowadays. The reader bent on self-improvement can choose between many: How Novels Work (John Mullan), How to Read a Poem (Terry Eagleton), How to Read a Novel (modesty forbids, but see below).

In the latest, How Fiction Works, James Wood’s publishers smear a thick layer of eulogistic grease around their product. It is: “A deep, practical anatomy from ‘the strongest literary critic we have’ (New York Review of Books).” There are eight similarly extravagant endorsements. Hyperbole of this kind is not Wood’s personal style and does him no service. If one has to pass a verdict, Wood is a commentator on literature possessed of truly remarkable gifts as a reader of the tiny selection of texts he conceives it worthwhile reading. His weaknesses are as thought-provoking as his strengths.

Wood has taken up a brave standpoint to carry out his life’s vocation. On leaving university he spurned the London literary establishment for a quite different route. He now works out of Washington as a writer and critic and has recently taken up an adjunct post at Harvard. He has no PhD. It is a badge of pride.

Wood’s roots are deep in English religious non-conformity. He opens this book with a comment which, in others, would look like dandyism: “I can say that I have used only the books I actually own – the books at hand in my study.” One should recall not Proust in his cork-lined room, but Bunyan in his cell, with only the Geneva Bible to read.

Wood hates academic flummery. His position at Harvard is as a professor of what is exotically called “the practice of criticism”. Like I.A. Richards, author of the manual Practical Criticism, what Wood enjoins is intensely solitary engagement with the text. Not with the writer’s “life and background”, not with “socio-historical context”.

How Fiction Works is arranged as a naming of parts (“Detail”, “Character”, “Dialogue”, etc). It’s very basic stuff – and all done with plentiful illustration from the novelists he looks up to. The most admired is Flaubert. “Novelists,” Wood proclaims, “should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all began with him.”

Wood’s eye for detail is uncannily good. “Hardly a day goes by,” he says, “in which I don’t remind myself of [Saul] Bellow’s description of Mr Rappaport’s cigar, ’the white ghost of the leaf, with all its veins and its fainter pungency’.” With other critics, that confession would sound somewhat precious. With James Wood – well, you must make your own mind up on that.

As Henry James said of George Eliot, Wood has the vices of his virtues. His strenuous “discrimination” verges at times on snobbishness. He despises “low” literature and would rather be boiled in oil than be seen carrying, say, the latest Elmore Leonard.

Wood’s distaste for coarse fare manifests itself as a resolutely blind eye where the great Victorian realists are concerned. On the only two occasions he mentions Vanity Fair he misspells the name of the heroine, Becky Sharp. It does not inspire agreement with his dismissive remarks on Thackeray.

How Fiction Works should find a place on every novel-lover’s shelf. It has the quality all useful works of criticism should have: refined taste, keen observation, and the ability to make the reader argue, passionately, with it.

John Sutherland is author of ‘How to Read a Novel’ (Profile)