Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008
The Prime of James Wood
By John Banville
How Fiction Works
by James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pp., $24.00
What is fiction for? This is one of those questions—How does a compassionate God permit cruelty? What do women want? Why is there dandruff?—which are probably not susceptible of an answer but which yet continue to niggle. At the simplest, we may observe that inside every adult there lives on a child who must have stories that thrill or soothe, and that even novels of the grandest seriousness are no more than elaborated fairy tales. But is this a sufficient accounting for, say, Middlemarch—which Virginia Woolf described as one of the very few novels written for grown-ups—or The Golden Bowl, or Samuel Beckett's Molloy? In his essay collection The Broken Estate, James Wood observes that 'fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to makes its case. Belief in fiction is always belief 'as if.'' Wood follows this with an apposite and characteristically subversive quote from Thomas Mann:
Review, 2776 words
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