March 15, 2010 Issue

I’m fascinated by the strategies that great writers use to make fictional reality appear real – sometimes so real that it appears to be, in John Updike’s memorable phrase, “the thing itself.” One such strategy, powerfully advocated by the realist critic James Wood, is free indirect style. Wood, in his How Fiction Works (2008), describes its effect: “The narrative seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to ‘own’ the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.” Wood has long admired this style. In “What Chekhov Meant by Life” (included in Wood’s 1999 essay collection The Broken Estate), Wood says of Chekhov, “He sees the world not as a writer might see it but as one of his characters might.” In “At Home in the World” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), he says, “In Tolstoy’s fiction, as in Chekhov’s, reality appears as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters.” At the same time as Wood has advanced this notion of fictional reality, he has argued against (rightly, in my opinion) magical realism (see “Toni Morrison’s False Magic” in The Broken Estate), and what he aptly calls “hysterical realism,” a style of writing “not to be faulted because it lacks reality – the usual charge – but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself” (see “Hysterical Realism” in his 2004 collection The Irresponsible Self).

Now, in a piece called “Keeping It Real,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, Wood trashes “the rather lazy stock-in-trade of mainstream realist fiction,” including “such basic narrative grammar” as “the cinematic sweep, followed by the selection of small, telling details,” “the preference for the concrete over the abstract,” vivid brevity of character-sketching,” and several other mainstays of conventional fictional narrative. “Keeping It Real” is a review of two realist works: David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, The Surrendered. Wood pans them both. He says of Shields’s book, which is an argument for realism, that, “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken.” But he goes on to say that Shields’s “unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic.” Wood provides only one extended quote from Reality Hunger, and based on my reading of it, I would have to say that it’s hard to judge whether Wood’s use of “rant” and “imprecise and overwrought” to describe the book is fair or not.

With respect to the other book under review, Lee’s The Surrendered, Wood provides only snippets of quotation. So again it’s difficult for me to form my own impression regarding the quality of its writing. Apparently it’s a far-ranging narrative (Manchuria, 1934, the Korean War, 1950, New York City, 1986, and ending with a pilgrimage to Italy). Wood says it is “utterly conventional,” “stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto.” But he also says it has many scenes that are “piercingly evoked” and that it is “spacious in design and reach.” In what are perhaps the most memorable words of the review, Wood calls The Surrendered “this slabbed magnificence.” He doesn’t say whether it or any part of it is written in free indirect style. Given Wood’s intense fondness for such a style, I suspect that if there were any evidence of it in the book, Wood would have mentioned it, and that he wouldn’t have been so quick to condemn the novel as “utterly conventional.” I confess I’m not familiar with Lee’s writing. But Wood’s review has aroused my curiosity about it. I see there are several stories by Lee in The New Yorker archive. I intend to access one or two of them and check out for myself what kind of fiction writer he is.