How Fiction Works by James Wood

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reviewed by John Murphy

How Fiction Works is a presuming title for a slim little book, made more conspicuous by a chapter called “A Brief History of Consciousness.” Oh, is that all? But the book’s author is James Wood, the New Yorker’s perspicacious literary critic, and his Preface quickly allays any fears of gassy pretension or self-importance. He writes that fiction is “both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.” It’s a deceptively simple thesis, and to prove it Wood picks examples from “the books at hand in my study,” like a wise man plucking fruit from the tree under which he sits.

Wood claims that “Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring.” Gustave Flaubert, through works like Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education, was the progenitor of the modern novelist: an ‘impartial,’ all-seeing eye acutely sensitivity to the significance of details. Flaubert wrote that “An author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” But which details to choose? Details cannot just accrete on the page like finger grease on a handrail. A writer, unlike our “aesthetically untalented” memories, must be selective. Wood borrows from Duns Scotus, a medieval theologian, the concept of ‘thisness’, a concreteness that lends details their correctness. He lauds the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins for the ‘thisness’ of his details: the ‘lovely behaviour’ of ‘silk-sack clouds’ in “Hurrahing in Harvest,” for example.

A detail weighted with ‘thisness’ becomes significant, perhaps symbolic. Literature is indexical, each symbol pointing to the greater truth that wraps around the glue-bound pages. Thus, Wood, concludes, the vitality of a literary character has less to do with action (or even plausibility) than with “a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.”

Catholic fiction is particularly rich in this respect, since the author views his characters as souls with eternal rather than earthly fates. The drama of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities or the Whiskey Priest in The Power and the Glory has less to do with the question of whether they will live or die, than with whether they will live eternally. As Ron Hansen wrote, “Writing with faith is a form of praying. Evelyn Waugh maintained prayer ought to consist of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication. And so it is in the writing of fiction, in which authors can adore God through their alertness to creation and to the Spirit that dwells in their talent; confess their own faults by faithfully recording the sins, failings, and tendencies of their characters; offer thanksgiving through the beauty of form, language, and thought in their creations; and beseech by obeying the rule of Saint Benedict which states: ‘Whatever good work you begin to do, beg of God with most earnest prayer to perfect it.’