James Wood is the literary critic on the New Yorker, and a contributor to the London Review of Books. All of which means that when he says ‘fiction’ he really means ‘literary fiction’. You’re not going to find an analysis of Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code here.
It is broken down into chapters, themselves subdivided into numbered sections. Chapter titles include ‘Narrating’, ‘Detail’, ‘Character’ and ‘A Brief History of Consciousness’.
Wood uses some of his favourite works to illustrate what his conception of the novel is (ultimately, this is a book about novels, not a more general work about fiction as the title might suggest), a view that is somewhat skewed towards novels in English. He’s clearly indebted to Kundera’s masterful The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain, but he dismisses these with a rather contemptuous remark that ‘occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text’, which is a ridiculous and indefensible thing to say about someone as widely and brilliantly read as Kundera is. Not to mention the fact that Kundera has written several masterpieces, while Wood’s own excursions into novel writing have been markedly less noteworthy.
That said, Wood is a highly perceptive and intelligent critic, and clearly loves great writing, a depressingly rare trait these days, when it’s hard to figure out if a given critic actually likes any writing at all given how often they are to be found slagging new work off.
This is a book I shall return to, as I regularly do to Kundera’s essays. Like them, it’s a fascinating and well argued look at the novel.
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