How Fiction Works (2008)
I enjoyed this book immensely. I haven’t read much literary criticism or “theory” — frankly, it never occurred to me to try — but so often these past few days Wood’s discussion of literature rushed past me like an express train through the station of a small town. Reading this book feels a bit like he’s sitting behind you on a train as you read, say, A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul, and he’s just leaned over to point out a paragraph and he whispers to you “See what he’s doing there? Look closely…” And later: “Isn’t that amazing?!”
There is much to review, carefully, in this book but I will restrict myself here to just one point. I wrote recently that I found the female characters in John Williams’ Stoner to be underdeveloped. I’m now rethinking this criticism, not because I feel it less but because of how Wood re-frames this feeling of inadequacy:
I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level. In such cases, our appetite is quickly disappointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author for not giving us enough—the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough.
And later, responding to E. M. Forster distinction between “flat” and “round” characters:
But if by flatness we mean a character, often but not always a minor one, often but not always comic, who serves to illuminate an essential human truth or characteristic, then many of the most interesting characters are flat. I would be quite happy to abolish the very idea of “roundness” in characterization, because it tyrannizes us—readers, novelists, critics—with an impossible ideal. “Roundness” is impossible in fiction, because fictional characters, while very alive in their way, are not the same as real people (though, of course, there are many real people, in real life, who are quite flat and don’t seem very round—which I will come to). It is subtlety that matters—subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure—and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do.
I have no doubt that I will revisit certain chapters once again. For now, I will end with an amusing story I learned from this book: an effort to civilise law-enforcement officials in Mexico about twenty years ago:
In their struggle to keep poorly paid officers on the right side of the law Neza’s authorities are employing an unlikely weapon: literature. Earlier this year the municipal president, Luis Sanchez, launched an initiative aimed at making Neza’s policemen better citizens. One of its cornerstones is to stimulate reading among them…
To begin with, a list of “suggested books” was circulated. It included Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century classic, Don Quixote de la Mancha, as well as 20th-century Mexican novels such as Juan Rulfo’s unsurpassable Pedro Paramo and Carlos Fuentes’ gothic novella, Aura; it listed such highbrow texts as Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s essay on Mexican culture, “The Labyrinth of Solitude”, alongside modern classics including One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Among other “recommended authors” were Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mexican detective fiction writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II….
Neza’s chief of police, however, believes that reading will improve his officers in at least three ways. First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary. “A policeman is responsible for communicating fluently. He must be able to speak well, even with delinquents. As his use of language improves, so will his efficiency.” Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. “A police officer must be worldly, and books enrich people’s experience indirectly.” Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. “Risking your life to save other people’s lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.”