The Life of Fiction: James Wood’s How Fiction Works

I.
Perhaps because critical theory has rendered the subject so fraught, it is unusual these days to see any literary critic dare define the nature of fiction itself. James Wood, however, is an unusual critic. An aesthete who emerged from academia at the height of the theory invasion, Wood has the air of a refugee. Like a dissident writer exiled from his homeland, he bears the mark of the culture he left behind, both in what he has rejected and what he has embraced.

Wood, who was recently took a new job as book critic for the New Yorker, is regularly referred to as ‘the greatest critic of his generation’, or in similar terms, by the likes of Cynthia Ozick and Norman Rush. Given such success, a book like How Fiction Works seems long overdue. Wood has previously published two collections of critical essays, but he has styled his new work rather differently: not as criticism per se, but as a primer on novelistic form, in the tradition of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. The book is divided into chapters, each treating a single formal element, such as ‘narration’ or ‘detail’. Although it gives its name to only one of these chapters, in a sense detail is the unacknowledged focus of the book as a whole. Wood is a devotee of detail, whether it be the delicate touches that create our impressions of a character, the subtle balancing of omniscience and subjectivity in third-person narration (‘free indirect style’, for which he has an evident fondness), or the nuance of meaning created by the careful manipulation of word and phrase.

Sins of the Father: P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson has an abiding interest in guilt. All of his films revolve in one way or another around its characters’ struggle with their consciences, but in his latest film he has surely expanded this theme into its ultimate iteration: There Will Be Blood wallows in guilt; bathes in it; dives, sinks and ultimately drowns in it. While There Will Be Blood perhaps lacks the range of emotion experienced in Magnolia and Boogie Nights, it more than makes up for it in depth. In oil man Daniel Plainview (played with a characteristic mix of caricature and subtlety by Daniel Day-Lewis), Anderson has created a figure of masculine weakness to rival Mr. Ramsay or Charles Foster Kane: a proud, stubborn egoist with a streak of vanity, and an impenetrable emotional distance that conflicts unattractively with a powerful hunger for affection. Scarcely off-screen for the film’s 158-minute duration, Daniel reveals his ugly secrets to us with a paradoxical mixture of intimacy and ambiguity.

American Myth: The Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men [pt. 2]

[Click for Part One]
On the release of Miller’s Crossing in 1990, the year that also saw the release of The Godfather Part Three and Goodfellas, the brothers commented that of all the gangster films released that year, theirs was the most ‘mythic.’ This word is fundamental to understanding the Coens’ approach to filmmaking. The conventional stories of genre fiction, conventions that emerged more or less organically from generations of pulp fiction writers and Hollywood filmmakers, are seen by the Coens as myths to be endlessly reformulated. In the same way that ancient Greek playwrights redigested their traditional stories over and over, to excite different emotions or to tackle different themes; the thriller or the screwball comedy is one basic story with fixed conventions that can be endlessly reinvented. Goodfellas is a film about gangsters; Miller’s Crossing is a film in the key of Gangsters, but its subject has no more to do with gangsters than with any other human beings. It seems to me that it is a film about ethics: it is a dramatisation of the axiom that the only true moral dilemma is a choice between two evils. But the archetypes of the gangster film give the story direct access to the psyche, taking part in the cultural dream that is the gangster narrative. Similarly, although O Brother, Where Art Thou? credits Homer’s Odyssey as its inspiration, the references to sirens and Cyclopes are really incidental. It is the manipulation of classic American stories, both apocryphal and true, that turns 1920s’ Mississippi into a mythic landscape to rival the semi-real Mediterranean of Odysseus’ wanderings.

American Myth: The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men [pt. 1]

Following the trail of blood left by his wounded quarry, Llewellyn Moss, an amateur antelope hunter, comes upon the aftermath of a failed drug deal: bullet-riddled trucks, dead and dying bodies and—that faithful MacGuffin—a case full of money. It will not be long before the trail being followed is left by Moss himself. This image of a trail of blood recurs again and again throughout No Country For Old Men, the latest film by Joel and Ethan Coen, adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Overuse by so many clichéd Hollywood movies has devalued the idea of ‘the hunter becoming the hunted,’ but it reclaims its poignant irony in this film, if only because the hunter in question so stubbornly refuses to accept his new role. Moss (Josh Brolin) is constantly devising new ploys to gain the upper hand over his adversary, the chilling killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In the average American movie, his self-confident tenacity would stand as testament to his heroism, even if it proved his undoing (think Cool Hand Luke); but the Coens deny him his moment of glory, robbing him of his iconic last stand. It is an unusual decision in a thriller, particularly such a tangibly American one; but for the Coens, any other course would be unthinkable.