Posts Tagged‘Book reviewing’

Home » Book reviewing » Page 68

Friday Find: Fiction Writers Review

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

I discovered Fiction Writers Review (FWR) when a Google alert returned a very kind reference to this practicing writer and her work. But even better than the personal pick-me-up those words offered was the introduction to the broader FWR site, “the site for writers who love to read and readers who aspire to write.”

Here, in part, is what the site is about:

We are a community of emerging writers dedicated to reviewing, recommending, and discussing quality fiction from presses big and small, from writers widely revered and little known. Our goal is to get writers and readers talking not only about how fiction reads but how it works and why it matters. FWR gives due attention to new titles (in hardcover and paperback), but we also revisit the backlist: classics, new classics, and books that add richness to our various writing lives. We also review adaptations, exploring how fiction can metamorphose successfully into something cinematic or staged. What makes a good adaptation? Is it more important to be faithful to the original or to acclimatize to a new form’s possibilities and limitations? What is lost, gained, or discovered in the process?

There’s much more to this description, but I want to encourage you to go to the site and check it out for yourself. How’s that for a weekend activity? Enjoy!

From My Bookshelf: How Fiction Works, by James Wood

by Erika Dreifus on
2

A MASTER CRITIC WRITES ABOUT THE ART OF FICTION

How Fiction Works by James Wood. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages. Hardcover, $24.00

Review by Erika Dreifus

Confession time: It’s more than a bit intimidating to be writing a review of a book by James Wood. That’s because Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University, is perhaps best known for his own reviews, which appear frequently in the pages of the New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer (he previously spent 12 years as a literary critic for The New Republic and, at the age of 26, was appointed chief literary critic of The Guardian of London). He is accomplished and knowledgeable, and his book provides exactly the caliber of writing about writing – and the same disposition toward realist fiction – that his readers have come to expect.

Which is to say that How Fiction Works is a smart, demanding, and rewarding read. It has certainly enriched my understanding of its subject, and deepened my admiration for some of my most beloved authors. But as much as I enjoyed the book, I suspect it’s not for everyone.

Its focus is not necessarily on offering a guide to how you might begin to write your own story or novel. Rather, it’s a careful study of, well, how fiction works, from the perspective of someone who has given a great deal of thought and time to the subject. Prospective readers might want to brush up on their Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Naipaul before plunging in, and might also wish to keep a dictionary nearby (I had to look up the meaning of “quiddity,” myself, as in “Since the novel has hardly begun, [John] Updike must work to establish the quiddity of his character”).

For the readers thus prepared, How Fiction Works provides a series of useful insights into the difficult and often mysterious elements that go into creating a novel or short story. Wood’s goal in this book is to examine what he describes in the preface as “the essential questions about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character? When do we recognize a brilliant use of detail in fiction? What is point of view, and how does it work? What is imaginative sympathy? Why does fiction move us?”

Wood has some experience on the other side of the critic’s table, as a fiction writer, and in the end he seems eager for his readers to find this a book that “asks a critic’s questions and offers a writer’s answers.” As he works through all the questions, Wood sustains a larger, overarching point: “that fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.”

Such are the threads running through the ten sections of How Fiction Works, sections focusing on staples such as detail, dialogue, and language, as well as sections less conventionally focused on “Flaubert and the Rise of the Flaneur” and “A Brief History of Consciousness.” Throughout, Wood relies on close readings from novels and short stories, from single sentences to chunky block paragraphs, to illustrate his points.

He also invokes the work of other critics, including two of his self-declared “favorites”: Viktor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes. Much to the book’s benefit, he also contributes his own decided opinions. Even if you don’t always agree with him (even before David Foster Wallace’s untimely passing in September 2008 the idea that Wallace’s work epitomized W.H. Auden’s suggestion that the novelist must “’become the whole of boredom’” seemed unduly harsh) you’ll appreciate Wood’s wit and his voice.

If literary fiction sometimes has a reputation for appealing to a relatively small readership, this very literary book about the art of fiction may similarly lack mass appeal. But just as literary fiction has the power to entrance and enthrall, so too does How Fiction Works possess the potential for illuminating the mysteries of our art and for instructing us on how to create it ourselves.

(c) 2008 Erika Dreifus
A version of this review originally appeared in The Writer magazine.

Random Encounter with a Former Editor

by Erika Dreifus on
2

On Tuesday night I made my first (and given the way my own writing seems to be going these days, quite likely only) visit to the Random House building on Broadway. I owe that opportunity to the wonderful people at Jewish Book World, who invited me to come to a reception held on the building’s 14th floor to celebrate their redesigned publication.

I arrived late (note to self: do not take a crosstown bus when various world leaders and [vice]presidential candidates are in town), but managed to hear a few of the speakers and, even better, caught up with a few people I was very glad to see again.

Among them was Josh Lambert. As former editor of JBooks.com, Josh was the first one there to accept my pitches and publish my work, so he has my eternal gratitude. I’d also noticed in some of his own recent bio notes–he is very much a practicing writer!–that he is about to become a published book author, so I was glad to have the chance to find out more about American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide), which will be published in January (JPS, for those who may not know, is the Jewish Publication Society. Expect to hear more about that book from me in due course.

(cross-posted on My Machberet)

Book Reviewing Basics

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

It’s been awhile since I’ve offered my online course for beginning book reviewers, and I can’t say it’s looking as though I’ll be able to return to that particular virtual classroom anytime soon. Luckily, though, Don Noble’s “Kind and Balanced: Four Lessons Toward the Well-crafted Book Review” offers some terrific pointers for everyone I’ve left in the lurch. His article is much more focused on the actual writing than the marketing of your reviews (and he’s also a self-declared prose specialist, so the article will be less useful to those who wish to develop their skills in reviewing poetry books). Bonus: Noble discusses how to review anthologies. I think it’s well worth downloading the Spring 2008 issue of First Draft (a publication of the Alabama Writers Forum) to read it.

How to Review Roth (Or Oates, Updike, Etc.)

by Erika Dreifus on
2

Unless you’re a book reviewer who writes only about books by first-time or “debut” authors, sooner or later you’ll probably encounter a methodological question: How much of an author’s previously published work should you have read before rendering a critical take on his or her newest book? And when the new book in question comes from someone as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates or Philip Roth, and assuming you won’t have managed to read ALL the author’s previous books before your editor needs your review, which books should you read? Does it matter?

As you may know, Joyce Carol Oates does indeed have a new book out, and Philip Roth’s next novel, Indignation, will be published this fall. Thanks to Steve Pollak, I’ve just discovered that Wyatt Mason is thinking ahead and wondering precisely “how much of Roth’s prior work [reviewers] will feel they should read before passing judgment on his latest effort?”

Mason continues:

Roth’s productivity, with its now-annual alarms, begs that a critic ask a few cumbersome questions that apply when approaching the work of any number of contemporary authors. Oates, Updike, Munro, Marías, Kundera, Coetzee, McEwan, T. C. Boyle, Amis, Pynchon, DeLillo, Rushdie: when reviewing the work of such generative authors, how familiar should the critic be with such writers’ earlier output? Should one have read, when sitting down to review Saturday or The Empress of Florence or My Sister, My Love, their writers’ other books? If not, why? If so, how many?

With Roth, a reader familiar with only Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint will necessarily form a very different picture of the preoccupations, tendencies, and techniques of the author in question than will a reader intimate with The Counterlife and Operation Shylock (or, alternately, The Breast and “The Prague Orgy”—one can, with Roth, produce a baker’s dozen of such pairs).

A knowledge of the first pair (Columbus/Complaint) alone would lead one to describe Roth as an attentive domestic realist, a trusting realist, one who employs various modes of literary realism (the lyric; the satiric) to probe various conventions of human behavior. The second pair (Counterlife/Shylock), though, would suggest a very different writer, one fascinated with form but not fully trusting of it, one who makes form as much a part of his story as character—who makes form, if not quite a character in the novel, a leading characteristic of the novel. And the last pair (Breast/Orgy) might suggest another author still, a miniaturist, one seeking to depict people trapped by impossible circumstances, whether fanciful or political.

Much as the historian assigned to review, say, Saul Friedlander’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews would be expected to have read a library of similar studies to be deemed a reliable arbiter, a critic assigned a novel by an established writer should bring to bear not merely a knowledge of The Novel but a knowledge of that particular writer’s engagement with the form. And although Roth and the writers listed above, owing to decades of industry, have made a broad knowledge of their work impractical to acquire, such knowledge, precisely because of its increasing rarity, becomes, for a critic, that much more essential to possess.

What do you think, practicing writers? Are any of you planning reviews of the new Oates or Roth books? How will you handle these questions? And what do you think of the suggestion that, like scholars who must be acquainted with the prevailing scholarship on a subject in order to write a reputable review of a new book, imaginative writers should possess analogous expertise?