A Fan's Notes
By Lev Grossman
In how fiction works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 265 pages), James Wood tells a story from Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, a novel that since its publication in 1932 has probably been read by only two people, namely James Wood and Joseph Roth. A military officer visits his servant, who is on his deathbed. When the officer enters, the old servant tries to click his heels together, even though he is under the covers and his feet are bare. It's a moment of deep, lancing pathos, when you seem to take in both characters' entire lives for an instant, as if they were two figures suddenly lit up by a lightning flash on a dark night.
Wood cites this anecdote--and, in a bravura display, four others that are just as poignant--in support of a technical point he's making about free indirect discourse and characterization. The funny thing about it is that even if you don't understand what he's talking about, the anecdotes still slay you. In other words, you don't have to know what free indirect discourse is to read it, because you already know how to read it. Which raises the question: Do we really need to know How Fiction Works?
Books about how to read fiction are a thriving business. This summer also brings us Thomas C. Foster on How to Read Novels Like a Professor (Harper; 304 pages) and John Mullan on How Novels Work (Oxford; 346 pages), though Wood, as a book critic for the New Yorker, is the heavyweight of the field. These books fall into the curious netherworld of extra-academic literary theory. They are the last, depleted descendants of what used to be called aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that theorized the human response to works of art. For most intents and purposes, aesthetics collapsed in 1970 under the weight of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. What's left is books like How Fiction Works--which is, oddly, a delight, but not for the reason it's supposed to be.
The pleasure of the book lies in watching Wood read. For Wood, the history of the novel is itself like a novel, in which genius-heroes perform astounding feats of literary innovation. Proust finds a new way to render character in Swann's Way ("Progress!" Wood shouts); Flaubert ("the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown") writes prose with a precision that until then had been reserved for poetry, and in the process inadvertently invents realism as we know it; Tolstoy narrates the fading consciousness inside a freshly severed head. Wood's enthusiasm is glorious. Reading alongside him is like going birding with somebody who has better binoculars than yours and is willing to share.
Wood writes about books the way other people write about sports; authors aren't so much Olympian as Olympic. Woolf writes, in The Waves: "The day waves yellow with all its crops." Wood reads this sentence so hard that he practically topples into it: "The effect is suddenly that the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow. And then that peculiar, apparently nonsensical 'waves yellow' (how can anything wave yellow?), conveys a sense that yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too--yellowness has conquered our agency." It's like Woolf landed a 1080DEG at the X Games. (Wood knows how to boo, too, and he singles out one book in particular: Terrorist, by his colleague at the New Yorker, John Updike. You can picture Updike raising one of his long, feathery, white eyebrows in response.)
The point of How Fiction Works is supposed to be Wood's theory of the novel. And yes, we dutifully make the rounds of narration, dialogue and so on, topics that inspire in even the most passionate reader a special, pure kind of boredom. But as Wood himself observes, "The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it." The novel is corrosive to systematic thought--whatever is good about it is precisely that increment that resists theorization. The great pleasure of Wood's book lies in the examples, not the points they prove, and the lessons lie in watching him read, not think. The novel exists only in practice, not in theory, in the moment when the brain hits the page--the moment when a dying servant's bare heels meet beneath the sheets on his deathbed.