James Wood
HOW FICTION WORKS
191pp. Cape. £16.99
978 0 224 07983 9

Near the opening of How Fiction Works, James Wood looks at the beginning of What Maisie Knew:

"James tells the story, from the third person, of Maisie Farange, a little girl whose parents have viciously divorced. She is bounced between them, as new governesses, from each parental side, are thrust upon her . . . . Maisie likes one of her governesses, the plain and distinctly lower-middle-class Mrs Wix, who wears her hair rather grotesquely, and who once had a little daughter named Clara Matilda, a girl who, at around Maisie’s age, was knocked down on the Harrow Road and is buried at the cemetery in Kensal Green."

He quotes a paragraph, finishing with Maisie’s affirmation that “Mrs Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green, where they had been together to see her little huddled grave”. Wood goes on:

"What a piece of writing this is! So flexible, so capable of inhabiting different levels of comprehension and irony . . . . James’s genius gathers in one word: “embarrassingly”. That is where all the stress comes to rest . . . . Whose word is “embarrassingly”? It is Maisie’s: it is embarrassing for a child to witness adult grief . . . the word encodes Maisie’s natural embarrassment and also the internalised embarrassment of official adult opinion (“my dear, it is so embarrassing, that woman is always taking her up to Kensal Green!”)"

Wood’s admiration for Henry James revolves around that writer’s knowingness about the reality of things. And, in many ways, How Fiction Works argues with those pseudo-Barthesians who elide fictional “realism” with naivety, or a bourgeois attachment to convention.

Wood’s criticism has its own knowing relationship with embarrassment. As a critic, he is able to point out things about texts that are, in retrospect, blindingly, even embarrassingly, obvious. His book is brilliant in many ways, particularly in its analysis of the tired jargon that surrounds much formal criticism of the novel. Narrators, he points out, for instance, are very rarely “omniscient”; “free indirect style” is anything but free. Indeed, what is impressive about How Fiction Works is its practical utility. As Wood writes, “I try to ask some of the essential questions about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character? When do we recognise a brilliant use of detail in fiction?”. The problem with general discussions about fiction is that it is hard enough to write about the details of one novel, let alone to comprehend an entire mode. Wood gets round this sense of enormity (what Pierre Bayard terms “the embarrassment around the work”) by resisting taxonomy. Breaking his thoughts down into aphoristic pieces, he concentrates his arguments around a select group of novels. “This little book”, he tells us, is about works he “actually owns”. All his examples are drawn from “the books at hand” in his study. After reading How Fiction Works, one learns that the authors represented in Wood’s study include, among others, D. H. Lawrence, Saul Bellow, Thomas Hardy, Knut Hamsun, Stendhal, Ian McEwan, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Henry James, John le Carré, David Foster Wallace and large quantities of Flaubert.

Wood is particularly good at analysing fictional register. He quotes from Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater:

"Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts – uberous, the root word of exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit – suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan . . . “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother."

“What an amazingly blasphemous little mélange that is”, he writes.

"This sentence is really dirty, and partly because it conforms to the well-known definition of dirt – matter out of place, which is itself a definition of the mixing of high and low dictions . . . since the comedy of the subject-matter of the sentence involves moving from one register to another – from a lover’s breast to a mother’s – it is fitting that the style of the sentence mimics this scandalous shift . . . . Sabbath’s Theater is a passionate, intensely funny, repellent and very moving portrait of the scandal of male sexuality, which is repeatedly linked in the book to vitality itself. To be able to have an erection in the morning . . . to be able to persist in scandalising bourgeois morality . . . as the ageing Mickey does . . . is to be alive. And this sentence is utterly alive, and is alive by virtue of the way it scandalises proper norms."

This is a revealing close reading. Intimate with the text, it also assumes a certain intimacy with its readers, both through its frank handling of the subject matter and the (implied) self-recognition by Wood in the passage itself. He admires this “moving and repellent” passage because it “brilliantly catches the needy, babyish side of male sexuality, in which a lover’s breast is still really mommy’s suckling tit, because mommy was your first and only lover”. Some might blench at the use of the second person here; nevertheless, it is a view of adult relations, which Wood perceives as both “misogynistic” and (alarmingly) “classic”.

As this suggests, Wood’s own critical register is complex, brilliant and occasionally irritating. Any distinctive textual voice, as Geoffrey Hill has pointed out, is a product of the way in which one writer registers the voices of others. The creation of an individual tone involves both admitting and excluding other tones. On a personal level, Wood often appears to admit more than most – and, in the current critical climate, it is unusual to find a writer who readily admits his own feelings. This aspect of Wood’s writing has sometimes been seen as old-fashioned or in bad taste – as if he were taking us to the critical equivalent of Kensal Green and showing us his Clara Matildas. He carries on regardless. His analysis of James’s writing is unabashed in both its emotion and its ethical engagement, but it is not unselfconscious. The allusive cadence “So flexible, so capable . . . so full” admits the ghost of Matthew Arnold (“so various, so beautiful, so new”) that has haunted him throughout his critical career.

On a critical level, however, there are a number of voices that will not gain admission into James Wood’s classic canon. As his 2001 article “Tell me how does it feel?” (written in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center) made clear, novels that resist emotional engagement are, for him, in some way lesser. Now, and especially after the attacks of September 11, he claimed, novelists must give us more in terms of their reflections of “human consciousness”. The conviction, repeated in this book, is that novelists have to make us feel deeply in order to be “truly serious” about what is “real”. The problem with Wood’s point of view here is that it only allows for one sort of reality, and one sort of feeling. He argues that postmodern novels miss “final seriousness” because “no one ever says, in life, ‘I don’t exist’”. But some people do think just that. As Peter Lamarque points out, for some, the question of the existence of other minds and other worlds is “not merely an idle philosophical thought experiment . . . but something we ‘live’, something distinctively and unavoidably human”.

Wood is right to argue that novels do not have to represent concrete or feasible reality in order to move us. He is countering those critics who accuse him of a slavish attachment to “psychological reality” in terms of conventional characterization. What a novel requires, he argues, is its own “consistency”: that the “reality-level” of a character or a detail in a novel is “tutored by each writer, and adapts to the internal conventions of each book”. However, by the end of the book, it seems clear that Wood’s critical world has its own internal conventions, which simply will not register those of a writer such as Thomas Pynchon, who can never be, he believes, “truly frightening”. He does not admit that, for some, Pynchon’s Against the Day is not “trivial metafictional game playing”, but a novel about ontology. Pynchon uses meta-fiction to question how and why people might feel (or not feel) for what Wood sees as the “real world”. His novels explore what it might be like to believe that this world is merely a waiting room or a story, and what one might do if one thought that way. In the light of the feelings surrounding fictional and religious belief after 9/11, I would say this idea makes Against the Day a truly frightening and serious book. Wood squeezes his dismissal of Pynchon into a footnote, as though his novels were not permitted to encroach on the world of the fiction he believes in.

As Wood moves between his approved texts, I was reminded of Henry James’s short story “The Great Good Place”. This satirical tale conceives heaven as a “sort of kindergarten”; nothing provides a challenge (and hills resemble gigantic bosoms). There is something of this in Wood’s writing about the books he owns. It is, like Mrs Wix, “safe”. This is why I found myself wishing away his occasional grace notes. “What a piece of writing that is!” he exclaims about Henry James. “How fine that is”, he adds after quoting a sentence by Marilynne Robinson. It is sometimes hard to distinguish a gasp of admiration for another’s skill from the contented sigh when the books in one’s study satisfy one’s own theories. James Wood is best, it seems, when interrogating how fiction works, rather than exclaiming over it. In any case, one thing that novels teach you is that you have to feel things for yourself.

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