The Care and Feeding of FictionJames Wood's critical manifesto is firm, yet flexible.
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2008, at 7:38 AM ET
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StumbleUponWood reserves his passion, though, and the greater part of his book, for another technique, a variety of third-person narration called "free indirect style," in which a novelist shifts subtly into a character's voice without benefit of he saids or she thoughts. Free indirect style allows an author to establish a sympathetic intimacy with a character, and, though Wood never comes out and says this, you sense that he thinks it is this motherly bond that imbues fiction with "lifeness"; here is the embryonic fluid in which the narrative "seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character." In What Maisie Knew, for instance, Henry James tenderly cedes the telling of the tale to the young, only partly comprehending Maisie, a generosity that gives that bitter story of youth destroyed by adult selfishness a sweetness that saves it from being unbearable.
More often than not, of course, "free indirect style" also opens up an ironic distance between author and character—What Maisie Knew, in which author and reader understand the parents' wickedness a great deal better than Maisie does, is the classic example of this sort of irony—and that tension, too, can jolt a story to life. Wood cites wonderfully funny examples of authorial irony from the works of Jane Austen and James Joyce, among others, but my favorite example comes from a Chekhov story, "Rothschild's Fiddle," that begins: "The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying." Chekhov plunges us without warning into the mind of a thoroughly distasteful coffin-maker, for whom, as Wood puts it, "longevity is an economic nuisance."
Other aspects of the novel warrant shorter meditations, but these are no less brilliant than the others. Wood considers characters and concludes that they need not be "round," as E.M. Forster famously maintained, or even well-fleshed-out. Wood has no aversion to Dickensian caricatures reduced to brief tag lines. What he does request is that characters be profoundly seen and ineffably alive. Dialogue, says Wood, should hold back as much as, if not more than, it says. A good metaphor does not just conform to a character's worldview; it "hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character's world."
Wood fishes for these rhetorical devices in the choppy waters of actual novels, often emerging with several at once. Take his reading of the phrase "leggy thing," which occurs in Nabokov's novel Pnin. Those are the narrator's words for a nutcracker that slips and seems about to shatter a precious bowl in a sink full of soapy water and is grabbed for by Pnin, that awkward, unhappy Russian professor. With leggy, Wood writes, "we can instantly see the long legs of the wayward nutcracker, as if it were falling off the roof and walking away. But 'thing' is even better, precisely because it is vague: Pnin is lunging at the implement. … Now if the brilliant 'leggy' is Nabokov's word, then the hapless 'thing' is Pnin's word, and Nabokov is here using a kind of free indirect style, probably without even thinking about it." So "leggy thing" yields detail, metaphor, and "free indirect style." It also opens a window onto two of the most pronounced characteristics of Nabokov's style, visual acuity and narrative insouciance—or, at least, Wood's reading of it does, which is the most you can ask of good reading.
I hope this isn't taken the wrong way, but by the end of How Fiction Works, I felt as though I had just read a very wise guide to parenting. I had been reminded of the important things in life, or at least the important things when dealing with one's own creations: Respect them. Give them room to blossom. Don't natter on; that sounds like nagging. "Tutor" or "teach" (Wood's verbs); don't "lecture." Be persuasive rather than dictatorial. One of the nicer virtues of lifeness is that it lifts realism above the tyranny of verisimilitude. So let Gregor Samsa* wake up as an Ungeziefer (properly translated, as has recently been pointed out, as some sort of vermin, not as a cockroach). Let Knut Hamsen's hero in Hunger eat his own fingers. Wood quotes Aristotle, who said that a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility: "[I]t is the artist's task to convince us that this could have happened." Wood also cites Henry James in the epigraph of the book: "There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery." Realism is true when it is persuasive, and it is persuasive when its author cares a great deal for the occupants of a fictional world: These are Wood's decorous precepts, and about them he is fiercely persuasive.
Correction, July 22, 2008: The original version incorrectly identified Kafka's character as K. rather than Gregor Samsa. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
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