How Fiction Works by James Wood

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There are only a certain number of ways to write a novel, says James Wood. With a few exceptions, you are mostly "stuck with third- and first-person narration". Wood is a superb critic, and he goes on to make you, his reader, feel anything but stuck. With exceptional brio, he shows you how writers write. Taking a passage from What Maisie Knew, by Henry James, he shows us the way James moves into and out of Maisie's mind, using tiny deft touches, like a painter. He also places us into the heart and soul of passages written by Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and Bellow, among lots of others. It's like being taught by a very good teacher. He gets into the minds of writers as they get into the minds of their characters. When you put the book down, your head will be ringing with images. Nabokov at the kitchen sink! Saul Bellow taking off in a plane! They are beautifully chosen.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

In the tradition of E. M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel" and Milan Kundera's "The Art of the Novel", "How Fiction Works" is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time takes the machinery of story-telling apart to ask a series of fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we 'know' a fictional character? What constitutes a 'telling' detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is realism realistic?Why do most endings of novels disappoint? Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Beatrix Potter, from the Bible to John Le Carre, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.