Every advance, however, carries with it the seeds of its own decay, as Wood is all too aware. Free indirect style, worked too hard, turns characters into authorial surrogates. Rigorously selected detail, in less rigorous hands, morphs into mere detail, "a necklace of noticings." The very practice of realism threatens to degenerate, through overuse, into hollow devices. Wood wryly enumerates them for us: "Why do people have to speak in quotation marks? Why do they speak scenes in dialogue? Why so much 'conflict'? Why do people come in and out of rooms, or put down drinks, or play with their food while they are thinking of something? Why do they always have affairs? Why is there always an aged Holocaust survivor somewhere in these books? And please, whatever you do, don't introduce incest."
The answer to this exhaustion, as Wood sees it, is twofold. The writer "has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging." The reader must then reward the writer's effort with careful, even prayerful reading. "We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality."
We must learn to read, in short, as James Wood reads. And as delightful as that sounds, I can't help noticing what's missing -- namely, anything to do with story. This is no accident. Wood has always been impatient with what he calls "the essential juvenility of plot," an attitude that comes through most clearly when he deigns to review genre writers. In "How Fiction Works," he uses a not very representative sample from le Carré's "Smiley's People" to damn the whole school of "commercial realism," its bloodless efficiency, its famished grammar of "intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling." Even when he finds a genre writer he likes, he acts a bit like Gladstone among the whores. In a recent New Yorker review, for instance, he writes admiringly of Richard Price's "Lush Life" but wonders why the author doesn't "free himself from the tram track of the police procedural."
It never occurs to Wood that a writer like Price -- or Patricia Highsmith or Elmore Leonard or Ruth Rendell or Ray Bradbury -- could find genre's confinements liberating, or that plot is more than a contractual obligation an author must fulfill before getting to the "good parts": the describing, the characterizing, the metaphorizing. Even in Wood's private pantheon, story is a far more organic concern than he is willing to concede. He justly praises the moment when Anna Karenina notices, as if for the first time, the odd shape of her husband's ears, but he neglects to tell us why. She is embarking on a calamitous love affair that is already estranging her from what she knows. Without that affair, without its conclusion, all of Tolstoy's grace notes would be a "necklace of noticings." Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" is a more compelling read than his "Sentimental Education" not because it's more stylistically felicitous but because it has an irresistible tragic arc. To act as if "Bovary" can be separated from its story is a bit like arguing that a tree can be isolated from its soil.
Flaubert famously dreamed of writing "a book about nothing," and one senses that Wood would like nothing better. Words and more words, inhabiting "a margin of the gratuitous." But surely that's just another variety of aestheticism, and surely it ignores what draws many people to stories in the first place, which is not "the tension between author and character" but the chance to go on a journey, to see one event follow another in a way that is surprising and moving and possibly transforming. Does this make us "worse" readers than Wood? Is story simply a vestigial organ that will be cast aside by evolution? Or is it evolution's engine?
Perhaps the only thing we can all agree on, finally, is this: Whatever we propose about fiction will be wrong -- in some moment, for some reader, for some writer. "The novel," as Wood himself writes, "is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it." I hope it will wriggle out of his rules, too.
About the writer
Louis Bayard is a staff writer at Salon. His forthcoming novel, "The Black Tower," will be published in August.
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