How Fiction Works

After a rough couple of days in which it was spectacularly apparent to me again that I have completely no clue what to do with my life, a small shining light was revealed in this fabric of night, and I received an email from the local bookstore, saying that the book that I had ordered had arrived.

I doubletimed it to the bookstore, handed in my order number and waited expectantly. The assistant came over to me, his eyes shining. Look at this, he said. it's so well done. The cover is straight out of the 20s, the font of the prose with its myriad footnoting is done in early nineteenth-century style, like Flaubert. I was holding a first edition, hardcover, in hot pink of How Fiction Works by James Wood, a Harvard professor of literature.

I'm halfway through, and I can't stop reading and at the same time I am pacing the reading, not too much at any one time, because I can't remember the last time I encountered such a dry, engaging, contemplative, passionate-about-good-literature, voice. And anyone who can reference Madame Bovary, Mr. Biswas and Robert Fisk at the same time has got my allegiance.

In reading it, I was also reminded of the fact that literary theory is often hijacked by dry academics who seek to impose rather developed discussions of philosophy, historicism and the old saws of culture and identity on a tract about human interaction. Wood's form of literary theory, is more basic, and truly exploratory, focusing on questions like What is a character? and acknowledging his own limitations on interpretativeness. While he is afflicted with a rather quaint adoration for Stendhal, James and Flaubert, and a well-appointed distaste for the postmodern (yay! another person who thinks Updike is a toolshed!), his observations are insightful, erudite and truly eye-opening.

It is an excellent, well-reviewed book (from The Economist no less, as well as the New York Times and I can't wait to continue reading it.