THE ART OF FICTION: How Fiction Works. By JAMES WOOD

Abstract

In an essay on Virginia Woolf in James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate (1999), the critic argued that all criticism is metaphorical in tendency because it continually asks what a work is like. In How Fiction Works Wood makes the reader look afresh at a well-known, critical judgement – Flaubert's importance to modern realist narrative: ‘Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him’. When, later in the book, he argues that all forms of modern prose narrative have their origins in realism, he states that realism ‘schools its own truants’. The richness of metaphor we find in Wood's writing is, then, more than a pleasing stylistic feature; it is central to his evaluative and expository procedures as a critic. The first of these examples appeared in his New York Times review of a biography of Flaubert; the second is found in the introduction to The Broken Estate. This indicates not only that Wood is happy to practise the type of ‘self-plagiarism’ that he detects (and defends) in Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dickens, and James, but also that How Fiction Works is a retrospective, consolidating work, designed, I think, to elucidate and restate some of the principles offered in Wood's earlier essays.