August 2009

August 31, 2009  James Wood On Fiction

Finished the Wood book today.  Delightful.  Lots of splendid things.  Super footnotes too.  I never knew the thing about French having a special tense for literary past only.  Helpful to know that somehow.  Even if only to say “it figures.”  Of course he is English and Cambridge so he does irritate at times.  One chief instance---page 105:  “But to repeat, what is a character?  I am thicketed in qualifications: . . . “

He gets Don Quixote wrong when he says the Don as a character does not change.  Virginia says, when I told her that, “he hasn’t read the book very well if he doesn’t see the changes.”

If I were under 40 I would certainly attack him too, as many have.  He is re-doing that “centrist” English commonsense, pragmatic setting us straight about the real essence of real fiction, real literature and he does it with that superior, calm tone of utter authority designed to drive all colonials crazy.

His chapter on voice, tone, register was just magnificent.  At other times, later in the book, the attempt to praise and define great style gets tedious----but then I think that has always been the problem with such attempts.

His last chapter feels ho-hum and not that enlightening or new.  And to offer “lifeness” as the term that will satisfy these ancient troubles with truth, convention, realism just feels like a weasley, lame maybe glib way out.  Weakening finally his whole project.

I wish he had just stayed with character and forgotten the need, the politics, to “save” realism from being considered a “genre” by some writers.

I wish too he had just titled the book “Ways I Really get Pleasure in Reading Fiction and Ways Many of You Also Do Too.”  Or something like that.  I had to chuckle when I noticed in tiny print on the back cover that the publisher put “Literature/Reference” on the cover.  Yeah, right.