"A illuminating tour of fiction?" What aN illuminating article.

i am so bored, why are you doing this?

"Surely, if it's doing its job, it need only be experienced. If it can't be experienced without tearing off its gown to expose the skivvies beneath, then it's even more of a minority art form than we feared."

I'm bewildered that someone who's been assigned the task of reviewing a piece of literary criticism would not have been exposed to the idea that literature can be appreciated on different levels. Of course you can read and enjoy Anna Karenina just for pleasure without any deep understanding of literature and get a lot out of it, but you can also read it more closely, and get more out of it.

What do you think people are doing in the academy when they write books and articles about literature and have their students write papers on literature? Why have literary critics at all? If we took your fourth-grade-level thesis to its logical conclusion, there would be no point in sharing our ideas about literature at all because we would all understand all there is to know about every book we read and couldn't benefit from what other people have to say about it. But the truth is, that even scholars who have been rereading and teaching Hamlet for years, and have even written their own analyses of it, enjoy reading and hearing what other people have to say about it, because there are always new ways to look at it, new contexts in which to view it, new associations to be drawn.

James Wood is not my favorite critic, and I probably won't buy this particular book, but I can see how such a book could be useful to some (although they shouldn't read it as if Wood's is the last word on how to read literature). Is there something wrong with trying to raise the level at which people appreciate great literature?

Is all this stuff about free indirect discourse new to you? And you're a literary critic?

Maybe this is a little inside baseball. But for me there is an expectation of great literature as revelation or mystic transport sans artifice. Of course there is always artifice, but it should not be seen or felt, it should recede over the horizon and remain invisible to the minds eye.

I've heard that Donna Leon, who I find enjoyable to read, considers her works more as craft than as literature. Food for thought.

I agree that "fiction" should carry a hint of plot, sequence, story. If a book fails to illuminate why some stories are better than others, it does not explain how fiction works. I have commented that "How Style Works" or "How Literary Prose Works" would have been better titles; reader Nigel Beale suggested "How Realism Works". Nevertheless, the book does make quite a few insightful and interesting points, such as the one on character quoted here:

http://livepaola.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/james-wood-on-character-in-fiction-and-iris-murdoch/

I think this piece cleanly punctures the failure of what I'll call the Nabokov school of criticism (as Wood so clearly takes his cue from the old Vlad). Wood's approach only works for the novel - far from the only literary form - and then only a very particular kind of novel at that. The sneering at plot, the canonization of a certain kind of interiority for characters, all seems kind of fusty at this point. It's why someone like Wood has trouble with say a Philip K. Dick, or a Homer for that matter. The middle-class novel is in its dotage, although your MFA program might tell you otherwise.

Ian McEwan not McEwen.

I think of criticism (be it of books, movies, whatever) as a conversation. It's often hard to find people as passionate as a subject as you are, and even harder to find people well-versed in the history of the form (this is much less an issue now than it once was, particularly with the popular arts). The minute I read a book or see a movie that really excites me I have to track down what other people think. Yes, I have conversations with real, live people too, but it's hard at times, especially with a new experience, to put ideas into words in an appealing way. Sometimes I look up critical response just to hear another opinion, sometimes because I have a question and I think they might help me find an answer. It's not Holy Writ and it certainly isn't infallible. It's a conversation over distance and over time. Sometimes, across centuries. I guess I'm saying it's entertainment.

Many contemporary "literary" novels, no matter how gorgeous the prose, are a little tiresome to get through, because the writers have not bothered to put together a compelling plot. Why? I think the real reason is that good plotting is difficult to do. It takes a lot of work. Commercial fiction may be lacking in terms of language or the depths of its observations, but it should be given the credit it deserves for offering a well-constructed story.

I assumed Bayard's question––"Does great literature need to be explained"––was rhetorical, anticipating the objection of a skeptic. It seems pretty clear that Bayard himself believes that literary criticism is worthwhile.

That said, Wood isn't really writing literary criticism here as much as a kind of primer. And, given the title, he doesn't appear to be claiming otherwise. The realist novel, from Austen to Bellow (Bellow? Really?) is a reasonable place to start for someone hoping to develop their reading chops.

But we professor types like to believe that literature doesn't need to be "explained" as much as engaged and explored. At its best, criticism is a form of thinking. You don't analyze a poem or novel the way a botanist studies a plant. At the further horizon, you take that novel (or genre or movement) as a kind of companion or aid to asking questions about one or another dimension of the world. Literature is good to think with.

As others have said, literature is also good to think about with other readers. If you buy the historical argument of Jurgen Habermas, talking about literature (with friends in coffee houses or with strangers in literary journals) was central to the way the middle class acquired political authority independent of monarchies. Discussing books probably has a declining future, but it does have a venerable past.