Admirers of James Wood’s essay collections The Broken Estate (1999) and The Irresponsible Self (2004) will know that he has a superb eye for detail and a pithy style, and readers of his novel The Book Against God (2003) will know that he can sustain our attention through a narrative. How Fiction Works offers itself as a primer of technique and also as an enquiry into the nature of realism. The book is divided into numbered sections, which proceed irrespective of the chapters on character, dialogue, perspective and so on, and suggest that it has more of a unity than is actually the case. Wood admits that the division into chapters is slightly artificial, since all these matters tend to merge into one another. As a result, although we are frequently arrested by a virtuoso passage of analysis, the book tends to become an anthology of such passages rather than a developing argument; we miss the grip and bite of the earlier essays, as well as their greater attention to rhythm and structure.

For Wood, modern fiction begins with Flaubert. That is already a contentious statement, for, plainly, modern Englishfiction does not, but Wood moves from English to American, to French, to German, to Russian fiction indiscriminately, and rarely recognizes the perils of using translations. Fiction, apparently, is fiction—it isn’t even always novels, since some examples are drawn from plays and films. To choose Flaubert as the starting-point is to dismiss the crucial inheritance of the English