James Wood is one of today's pre-eminent literary critics. In How Fiction Works, however, the New Yorker writer and Harvard professor is anything but a critic, instead presenting himself as a humble and ardent reader who wants to share a few things he's learned along the way. The book is as inspiring as it is erudite — a concise, elegant memorandum on the craft and history of fiction.

Wood begins with a discussion of free indirect style, a kind of third-person narrative that allows the author and the character to speak simultaneously through the text. According to Wood, Flaubert laid the foundation for modern realist storytelling through characters who exist at once on their own and as surrogates for their creator — the resulting tension between creator and creation giving birth to dramatic irony. Throughout the book, Wood traces exemplary instances of detail, character development, and dialogue to this early development in the novel, playfully noting that, "novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring."

Wood's arguments are most effective because he delivers them as observations rather than as doctrine. Sure, he reveres realism, but he also suggests that all good writers are realists — even contemporary stylists like Nabokov, Bellow, and Roth. As such, the trick to writing good fiction is not to dismiss realism as conventional, but to "search for the irreducible... the element in a style [realism] which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced." In this way, How Fiction Works looks ahead to the achievements of future novelists, reminding us that you can do much with fiction, as long as you do it well.

-Adam Lefton