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How Fiction Works
This is just a flat-out great response to James Wood’s book.
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
It is a brilliant response! I totally agree. (And anyone out there interested in either literature or film who hasn’t yet discovered the pleasures of AD Jameson should look him up and read everything you can, posthaste. The guy writes about movies with such passionate detail that I am stunned. I’ve read less of his writing about literature, but enough that I know he is equally intelligent and stimulating. You may well not agree with everything he says, but you will be intrigued, I guarantee it.) And yet, it still doesn’t change my opinion that Wood is completely correct about William Gass–based not on Wood and his often ridiculous theories of writing/literature, but based on Gass’s own stated (and, I would argue, ridiculous) theories about writing/literature. Wood nails him.
Wood rarely “nails” anyone, and while I am grateful to him for introducing me to, for instance, Bohumil Hrabal (whom I LOVE), nine times out of ten when I read an essay or review by him, I want to drop the page out of a very tall window (tied to a brick).
It seems like he just dislikes Wood. I just read his book and it is clear that Wood prefers a certain type of realist style but he does not aim to say that anything else is useless. And that is what this post seems to be trying to put in his mouth. Wood points out their weaknesses but also their strengths. Wood spends most of his time on how the majority, the more traditional, of fiction works and he makes that clear. At no point does he put himself as an authority of what all of fiction should be.
He has done that in the past. I read his book because I strongly disagreed with him on his articles about hysterical realism. He seemed to be unfairly critiquing people like Zadie Smith and Wallace for the books they did not write instead of the books they did write. I had a sort of negative of opinion of him because of that but still heard from credible sources that he was a good critic. So I read his book and it was much less preachy on what fiction should be but is instead mostly about the techniques used in the majority of fiction. And reading it, I did not feel like he dismissed the more post-modern styles as this post suggests. BTW I’m a lot more familiar with postmodern authors than I am with the realists.