“I am thicketed in qualifications”, “When I encounter a prolonged ekphrasis . . . I worry”: lines in James Wood’s new book keep reminding you why he was such a frequent presence in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner when he lived and reviewed in Britain. Since then, he has crossed the Atlantic and become professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard. How Fiction Works revealingly exhibits his practices as a literary critic. Divided into 123 small sections, it lays out his perceptions (which always strain towards aphorism) in a format suggestive of Pascal’s Pensées or the like. But what Wood mainly sees himself as writing is a “patient primer” – like John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing – about an art form. “Mindful of the common reader” (whose response to such pronouncements as “under the new dispensation of the invisible audience . . . the reader becomes the hermeneut”, you wonder about), he aims to illuminate elements of fiction such as character, point of view, dialogue and detail.

A notable earlier exploration of how fiction works, EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, “now seems imprecise”, Wood regrets. It’s a charge, you increasingly feel, that he isn’t altogether securely placed to make. Getting under way with a crass misquotation from one of Philip Larkin’s best-known poems, his treatise doesn’t excel at accuracy. While going at one point into a characteristic flurry of fancifying about literary names (“Wordsworth is surely worth his words” etc), Wood repeatedly misspells the name of Thackeray’s most famous character, Becky Sharp, and believes that Dickens showed allegorical expertise in calling a criminal Crook (Krook is his far more weirdly resonant name). Larger-scale gaffes, encouraged by a taste for dramatic generalisations, feature, too. Characters in DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Wood asserts, all “sound the same”. But only a cloth-eared critic could fail to detect a difference between, say, the regional speech of a central figure such as Tom Brangwen (“Why tha’s nobbut this minute come”) and the stilted English (“She was one year when he died”) of the Polish widow he marries. In similar mode, Wood declares, “In Britain . . . the weather is always the same: grey, a bit of rain” (it’s some years now since he left these climes, but you’d think there’d be at least one editor at Cape who occasionally looked out of the window and might query this).

Obfuscation also comes from mishandled metaphor. As readers of his reviews will know, letting Wood anywhere near figurative language is like giving an alcoholic the keys to a distillery. In no time, he’s unsteady and comprehensibility is a casualty. Getting images upside down is a speciality. The personality of a Svevo character is, Wood writes, “as comically perforated as a bullet-holed flag” – an odd view of what’s comical since such a flag would usually be found among the dead and mutilated on a battlefield. Another character is “inundated with impressions . . . like Noah’s dove”. The point about Noah’s dove, though, is that it wasn’t inundated but survived the flood and ultimately brought back evidence that the waters had subsided.

Behind the showy blurriness of Wood’s prose are some unexceptionable observations about fiction. But his overview is partial in two ways. Happiest when indulging in close reading that allows scope for exclamatory approval of local verbal effects (“gorgeous”, “lovely”, “marvellous”, “exquisite”, “how fine that is”), he omits sizable fictional techniques such as structure or character interaction. Meanwhile, favourite authors get effusive notice. Saul Bellow in particular attracts commentary of almost slavish fulsomeness. “Until this moment,” Wood gasps about his description of a plane taking off, “one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence.”

Excitable self-intrusion of this kind is a constant obstacle. Unusual personal disclosures (“Hardly a day goes by in which I don’t remind myself of Bellow’s description of Mr Rappaport’s cigar”) keep impeding access to Wood’s analyses and arguments. The most self-advertising of critics, he hogs so much of the foreground that you often have to peer round him to get a glimpse of the text or genre he’s supposedly elucidating. What this book provides most insight into isn’t how fiction works but how Wood performs.

HOW FICTION WORKS by James Wood
Cape £16.99 pp194

Available at the Books First price of £15.29 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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