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The Magician's Secrets Jul 22, 2008 (91 of 103 found this helpful)
James Wood conducts a concise but edifying tour behind the curtain of novel making, aimed primarily at the student and interested layperson. He examines the techniques used by the novelist that readers routinely take for granted. By spotlighting and defamiliarizing them, he demonstrates how they have evolved over the centuries, including examples of both good and bad usage.
Topics include free indirect style, the conciousness of characters, reality in fiction, successful use of metaphor and simile, different registers of tone, among others.
One of his most interesting discussions is on characters: how have different writers approached creating characters, including a history of critical responses to those approaches.
This is typical of Wood's modus operandi: take a basic component of novel writing and examine the assumptions we make as readers in order to understand and use what we are reading; what are the conventions writers and readers have evolved, and how did they come into being. Wood's style here is mostly shorn of the metaphors that illuminate his prior collections of criticism; the writing is invariably clear and succinct.
My only disappointment was in his episodic inability to refrain from revealing key plot points (i.e. Anna and the train) that may diminish the pleasure for future readers.
This is the best book I know to make one a more observant and appreciative reader.
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Self-important and filled with jargon Jan 28, 2009 (54 of 67 found this helpful)
Too much micro-analysis, too little attention to the whole; too much scorn for the "popular," too much delight in his own prose ("Nearly all of Muriel Spark's novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved"), way too much jargon ("Characterological relativity"? Really?).
Wood is intensely interested in small things. In use of detail, in single phrases and sentences, in rhythm and vocabulary. Which is fine, and I gave the book two stars instead of one because he makes useful observations about the construction of prose. His section on "The Rise of Detail" was particularly good, and I plan on rereading and making use of it.
But he pays no attention to the entire novel. He spends page after page after page rhapsodising about single sentences and details. Saul Bellow's description of flying, he enthuses, tells the reader exactly what flying feels like. "And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence." (Yep, that's been my entire experience of flying up to this point. I blandly inhabit a deprived eloquence.) What the entire novel does, why we might read it, what effect the whole sweep of it might have on us, and (most important for a book called How Fiction Works) how the writer constructed it-all of these things are ignored.
He's also a snob. He loathes something he calls "commercial realism," a style which "lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling," and instead praises the obscure, the high, and the literary. Plot he dismisses as unnecessary-unless your reader is slow and uninterested in real fiction. The novel does not have plot, he implies; it does something much more important. Yet he can't really express what this is without resorting to academic jargon and self-consciously pretty writing: "And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere." I have a mental picture of Mr. Wood reading that sentence out loud and kissing his fingers like a chef: What a beautiful sentence! (Maybe, but what does it mean?)
And talk about a gratuitous slap: when David "sees Bathsheba," Wood writes (on the way to analysing David's character as one who "sees, and acts...[a]s far as the narrative is concerned, he does not think"), "what happens to him is not an idea, or at least not in the way that Jesus, that cheerless psychologist, meant when he said that for a man to look lustfully upon a woman is already to commit adultery."
"Cheerless psychologist," huh? What pithiness, what cutting insight. (That is sarcasm.)
But there it is. He is flip, self-satisfied, self-absorbed. He is uninterested in the entire novel, obsessed instead with single phrases and turns, with minor effects and details. He scorns plot as "essentially juvenile" but leaves us with vagueness about what the novel should be doing instead. (Apparently "subtle analysis of character" is important, but he doesn't make clear what this is.) Buy The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist by Thomas McCormick instead.
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middlebrow Aug 4, 2008 (93 of 119 found this helpful)
A disappointment. Based on a few print reviews I was expecting something really terrific, and there are four or five nicely turned passages here. But Mr. Wood has a terribly narrow sense of what makes fiction worthwhile, and seems to have no feeling at all for the pleasures of plot or the music of contemporary language. For him it all comes down to the gentlemanly delectation of "fine moments" in novels. One could forgive him this fussiness if it were done exceptionally well, but in fact this book is a kind of inflated pamphlet, with huge margins and large print, which simply strings together some ideas about narration and character. It is a real step down from a delightful book I first read at college in the 1960s and have returned to several times since: Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, which I'm happy to see is still in print. It is really scandalous that Mr. Wood didn't see fit to mention this forebear from which he borrows so much.
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A personal and practical approach to a master critic Sep 1, 2008 (8 of 8 found this helpful)
This book works for me on many levels.
It was great fun to read the many thoughtful reviews and comments here on Amazon. I found the Reviews of Charlus, Stanley H. Nemeth and madman particularly thoughtful and insightful; I found the Comments of Doug - Haydn Fan', especially Doug - Haydn Fan, The Ghost of M, Thomas Plotkin, and Stanley Nemeth first rate. Literary fireworks of the first order, all engendered by Wood's little volume, and I enjoyed the show very much.
A similar collection of reactions -- less erudite in general -- appeared in "The New York Times Book Review" for August 31. It's fascinating that a major critic can engender so much passion and so much learning, all at the same time.
Wood helps me deepen my understanding, appreciation and pleasure in reading great fiction. Five years ago Edith Grossman released a wonderful translation of Don Quixote. After reading Wood's review in "The New Yorker", I re-read Cervantes's great work with deeper pleasure. "[I]t is worth reminding ourselves of the gross, the worldly, the violent, and, above all, the comic in "Don Quixote"--worth reminding ourselves that we are permitted the odd secular guffaw while reading it. If all of modern fiction comes out of the Knight's cape, one reason might be that Cervantes's novel contains the major comic tropes, from the farcical to the delicately ironic." Comment 1, fn 1.
Wood infuriates me, and teaches me. He analyzes an essay by Orwell in which a condemned man avoids a puddle on the way to his execution. "There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit."
But wait a minute: could the condemned man have been saving his shoes for another inmate? Perhaps he was a Buddist avoiding killing a living thing hidden in the puddle; the Life of Pi teaches us that practicing religion at the end of our lives may help us avoid missing "a better story". Perhaps the prisoner hoped for a pardon? Was his avoidance similar to Commander Scobee's last recorded act pressing the communication button on Challenger? Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin describes two deaths in moments. Johnson, according to Boswell, thought hanging "concentrates [one's] mind wonderfully." Was that prisoner's act truly "a margin of surplus".
The previous paragraph is my pale imitation of one of Wood's often repeated effects; as Kirn describes it in the "Times" review: "He drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed." [Footnote 2.]
Wood's references compliment me when I am reminded of remembered reading. They challenge me when I know most, but not all of the references, and inspire me to search out the gaps in my learning. They irritate and intimidate me when I don't know any of the references at all.
Wood's book provides a good index and a very useful chronology of his major references. His book would have been greatly improved for me if he had provided a glossary of terms -- I'm not sure exactly what he means by Modern and Post-Modern fiction, and not at all sure what fiction preceded Modern fiction. What exactly is "lifeness" -- and how can "fiction" be imbued with "lifeness"? -- at one level they seem to be contradictory ideas. Is "lifeness" different from "the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiry."
I would also have liked a glossary because his terms collapse into each other: "when I talk about free indirect style, I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real ...." I'm not sure I understand the margins of the these words and phrases and others he uses throughout his book.
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The True and the Beautiful, but What Happened to the Good? Aug 10, 2008 (66 of 87 found this helpful)
James Wood's book is largely an engaging read filled with pleasing sentences and often telling illustration. It deals principally with writerly skills, and those particular uses of them which make in novels for the Beautiful. Among the most important of these is the indirect or ironic narrative style whose virtues Wood demonstrates in detail. The author in similar fashion moves on to treat with equivalent freshness such expected areas as characterization and language. Then, toward the end of the book, he turns to the question of the True in novels, and persuasively argues for what he calls "lifeness." Such concerns of Beauty and Truth are of obvious centrality to both the creative writer and the appreciative reader of novels. So far, I'd argue, so good.
The book finally and sadly disappoints, however, and it does so owing to the author's inadequate and stale, if still widely fashionable view of what in novels constitutes the third element in Plato's trinity, the Good. About the freshest Wood gets in his noticeably scant treatment of this topic is a twice repeated quotation from George Eliot on how novel reading can expand our sympathies, enlarge our human capacities and horizons. Surely this is true as far as it goes, but Wood implies much more here which he doesn't seem to realize is highly questionable. If I read him rightly, he is praising readers of novels who leave Plato's Cave in order just to become "non-judgmental" multiculturalists, open to all times, places, and persons. And this assumption, held apparently with uncritical dogmatism, is as far as Wood goes in considering the Good.
Wood's thinking, despite his own early voiced Joycean fear of pedantry, finally itself smells too much of the shop. He values the difficulty of the doing almost to the exclusion of the human worth of the thing done. His enthusiasm, for example, for the artistry in a particularly gross passage from Philip Roth coupled with an ignoring of any deeper moral considerations may stand as the signature of Wood's strengths and weaknesses as a critic. What he omits in bowing before the artistry of any skillful wielder of words is what Flannery O'Connor included when she quipped that for Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" adultery was a sin whereas for rootless postmodern fiction writers, critics, and readers it is at most "an inconvenience."
Flannery O'Connor, by the way, whose own brilliant book of criticism "Mystery and Manners" Wood oddly neglects, shared with Plato and Tolstoy the belief that art was so powerful a force, it could be dangerous, to the artist and to society. On the other hand, PBS a few years ago inadvertently revealed its cruder idea that art in our time had at last been defanged and was instead now happily insipid, the station even going so far as to offer subscribers a self-congratulatory button sporting the phrase "Fear No Art." In his inadequate handling of the "Good" in the art of the novel, James Wood for all his sophistication places himself, I'm afraid, on PBS' side of the court.