James Wood on 'How Fiction Works' | Newsweek Books

IDEAS
He Gave Liberalism A Good Name
Jeremy McCarter 9/27/2008 12:00:00 AM
When the feuding tramps in "Waiting for Godot" trade insults, Gogo ends the exchange with a slur so vicious it leaves Didi speechless: "Crritic!" He doesn't explain what he means, and doesn't need to. Samuel Beckett assumes that his audience already knows critics are small-minded, mean-spirited, parasitic killjoys (or words to that effect). Speaking as a critic, I see a lot of truth in the description. But not every critic can be depicted that way. Some critics are diligent, bighearted, visionary. Some are even heroes.
APPRECIATION
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
David Gates 9/14/2008 12:00:00 AM
When the news came that David Foster Wallace, only 46-years old, had hanged himself in his home in California, I opened his masterpiece, the 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," at random and happened to land on a scene in which a recovering drug addict recalls a childhood moment of existential dread. "It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted . . . I understood on an intuitive level why people kill themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling, I'd surely kill myself." We'll surely be spotting more and more of these clues in his work: some writers—Hemingway was one—seem to take years composing their suicide notes right under our very noses. In Wallace's last book, a story collection called "Oblivion"—oh, now we get it—the self-tormenting protagonist of "Good Old Neon," an ad man who has felt like a "fraud" his whole life (and who used to know one "David Wallace" when he was a kid) swallows antihistamines and drives his car into a bridge abutment. And in Wallace's commencement address to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College, he dragged in—if not exactly out of left field, certainly out of left center—"the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master . . . It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."
BOOKS
The Short of It: Five Books You Do Have Time For
Roxana Popescu 3/26/2008 12:00:00 AM
There are two ways of ending up with a short book: start with a blank page and build up, or start with a bloated manuscript and chop. Lorin Stein, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, wishes he saw more of the former. "Writers are pushing themselves to write longer than the story they have to tell," Stein says. But short reads may be making a comeback. Penguin Classics has issued three series of slim stand-alone and excerpted texts by Confucius, Marco Polo, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. The slim volumes were created to capitalize on people's "need for speed," says Penguin Classics executive editor Elda Rotor. And editors are always on the lookout for the next small wonder. "I'm definitely open to our publishing very short novels," Stein says. Just don't call it a novella, he says. That sounds so, like, 1899.
A LIFE IN BOOKS
Ann Patchett

Patchett landed on the best-seller list with her 2001 novel "Bel Canto," a PEN/Faulkner Award winner about a hostage crisis in South America that has sold more than 1 million copies. Her most recent work is "Run," the story of a fictional mixed-race Boston family. Her list:
The Good Life
Take A Literary Field Trip

Those keen to combine their passion for travel with a love of reading are increasingly signing up for literary tours, which can range from the laid-back to the intellectually rigorous. On the laid-back end is British Tours Ltd.'s private one-day Jane Austen trip from London ($970 for four people; britishtours.com).
Lost in Translations
Malcolm Jones
War and Peace" still looms large over the literary landscape, intimidating readers and writers much as it has for the last century and a half. Hemingway, as competitive as he was insecure, playfully talked about getting in the ring with Mr. Tolstoy. Henry James derided "War and Peace" as a "loose, baggy monster." Even Stalin—who never met an author he wasn't afraid to ban, jail or murder—knew better than to forbid Russians from reading "War and Peace." Over its lifetime, the book has become a yardstick for quality—and sometimes just a yardstick.