Conrad, Peter. "Celebrate the Force of Fiction: Review of Wood's HOW FICTION WORKS." OBSERVER February 17, 2008.

James Wood, once a Guardian book reviewer, is now professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard. Despite its clunkily repeated preposition, the latter job description spells out a defiant faith in practice as opposed to theory. The theorists who used to be so academically modish had little knowledge of literature and even less love for it. The aim of their endeavours was to dispense with what they criticised, since literature was at best the residue of a false consciousness, a tissue of oppressive untruths overdue for demolition. Wood, proud to be a practitioner, rebukes such arrogant scepticism. Even Barthes, whom he admires, is accused of possessing a 'sensitive, murderous' contempt for fictional realism and the reality it upholds. 'Alienated from creative instinct', such critics vilify a bright, illuminating energy they cannot share. Wood is not of their number. By examining the minutiae of character, narrative and style in a range of fictional works that starts with the Bible and ends with Coetzee and Pynchon, he fondly and delicately pieces back together what the deconstructors put asunder. This is, as its humdrum title proclaims, a manual, an exploration of writerly craft. Though it deftly reveals how fiction works, its secret ambitions are grander. 'How to push out?' asks Wood at one point, investigating the way novelists magically induce static figures to move and take on independent life. With simple, beautiful precision, his question sums up his credo: the novelists he most admires, Austen and Woolf, James and Bellow among them, bravely launch themselves into deep waters, relying on the momentary inventiveness of language to animate the worlds they are inventing. They do not take an inventory of things that already exist; like God, they make reality up as they go along, ecstatically improvising. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/feb/17/fiction.reviews.