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Completeness seems to bother James Wood. His readerly affection for the silent parts of fiction gives his How Fiction Works a welcome portion of loosy-goosy admiration for the unround and the unresolved. I don’t know much about the range of contemporary literary criticism, but some critics, it seems, need their characters round and their resolutions complete. Piffle, says Wood.

We readers will find How Fiction Works a rich guide to the peculiarities (and conventions) of modern fiction. And it’s a helluva read. Honest. Wood has made litcrit compelling, giving us a page turner, a thriller-for-book-nerds filled with, if not exactly surprises, dozens of Aha! moments with flashing lights and clanging bells for the more excitable among us.

The cornerstone of Wood’s analysis is his discussion of what he calls the free indirect style, the third-person narrative style that enables the author to inhabit the voices of characters, shifting from an omniscient, external voice to the voice of the character, sometimes to the voice of the context in which the character lives. Wood notes other writer’s references to this style ("close third person;” “going into character;” “close writing") and provides plenty of examples from writers we know: Austen, Naipaul, Chekhov(of course), Updike. And others.

By using free indirect style, Woods observes, writers maintain their distance and inhabit their characters at the same time.

He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tirelessly unhappy, almost sick. What the hell should he say?

Only one part of this passage is strictly third person; the rest is the character speaking to us, or, rather, speaking to himself with the writer as intermediary. We can see an “objective” third-person view of the character, we can see what the character sees and we can hear the character address his problem. While not a exactly a new insight, Woods gives this style a thorough and useful treatment, at least one for us less academically endowed and encumbered.

Wood spends considerable energy and space discussing flat and round characters, frequently extolling the charms and virtues of the former. Traditionally, it seems, critics prefer round characters, at least for the big players in a work of fiction, over flat characters, who are OK and necessary to move the narrative or highlight the nature of the round characters. Round characters usually get considerable description, become rounder (I guess this is the term) as the story progresses, and sometimes change in significant ways, such change often being the core event of the novel.

Flat characters, on the other hand, get less authorial attention, rarely obtain more layers of human qualities as the novel progresses, and, since flat, have few human characteristics that could be transformed. On the other hand....

Flat characters are often reader favorites. Achilles. Polonius. Mr. Darcy (most Austen men, actually). Chauncey Gardiner. Flat characters often carry a key attribute or, even, a catchphrase, like Mrs. McCawber’s repeated avowal that she would never leave Mr. McCawber. An author’s repetition of this attribute or catchphrase turns flat characters into steady friends we often welcome as their rounder, more changeable, colleagues navigate a narrative’s twisty turns and slippery slopes.

Round characters are, of course, collections of many attributes and attitudes, skills and sensibilities. But these round characters are still not real since no novelist can represent all of what makes a person real.
The best round characters aren’t round at all and we all know it. They may be some sort of hard-to-measure geometrical shape, but they certainly aren’t, well, people.

Wood prefers the distinctions “transparent” and “opaque.” Some characters show more of themselves than others, and show more or less of themselves at different points in the story. Since fiction probably has something to do with truth or the nature of reality, these traits may be more helpful for writers and readers than the ubiquitous round/flat distinctions.

To frame the history of fictional character development, Wood traces the progression from religious, to theatrical, to fictive presentation; from prayer, to soliloquy, to free indirect style. He explores and explains much about detail, metaphor, voice, dialogue and, my favorite, language. He makes it clear that the best fiction, in falling short of answering all our questions, delivers the mysteries and the wobbly, uncertain world we need to be authentic characters ourselves.

Wood is a knowledgeable, thoughtful critic who has written a book that should help us handle, and love, the instability of the modern novel. Contemporary authors have found many ways to bring the uncertainty, ambiguity and richness of our lives into fiction. And we are better for it.

R3W

(Unfortunately, How Fiction Works is not available for our Kindles yet. I’m sure it’s just a simple oversight which will be corrected as soon as a few of us hit that button at Amazon that automatically harasses the fine folks at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)