ENTERTAINMENT

James Wood's third book of literary criticism, How Fiction Works, is not a manual for critical theorists; Mr. Wood rejects patently theoretical approaches to literary analysis that ignore aesthetic pleasure in favor of philosophical deconstruction. For the most part, literary academics are the only ones still practicing this kind of critical raiding.

Though also theoretical in his fashion, Mr. Wood's aim in How Fiction Works is to introduce general readers to a more intimate way of reading. Here, and in his previous critical works, The Broken Estate (1999) and The Irresponsible Self (2004), Mr. Wood practices and promotes "close reading." This style of analysis, he suggests, best shows how literary novelists illuminate life.

Paying close attention to narration, detail, dialogue and character, Mr. Wood discourages us from reading fiction as representative of reality. Instead, fiction should be read as art. That is, literary novelists want readers to imagine actions and interrogate their own.

Mr. Wood backs up his provocative assertions with his intimidating and encyclopedic knowledge of Western literary history, especially French, British and Russian fiction.

Omniscient, outside and above the text, readers, he says, should not like or dislike characters but follow the novelist's analysis of human consciousness, sympathizing with the sharp complexities of being.

Mr. Wood, then, is making a philosophical argument for fiction as the best way to understand humanity.

For Mr. Wood, novelistic realism is the most pleasurable and dexterous form of literary art. Some will grumble, chafing against his disinterest in science fiction, outré postmodernism, magical realism or, the recent coinage, hysterical realism. He's an acolyte of classical modernism; it's unsurprising that among his exemplars of high realism are novelists such as Gustav Flaubert, Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth. Their fictions express truths about the intricacies of psychology and the life-invigorating pleasures of art.

Whether he's noting a blazing metaphoric phrase or parsing a free indirect description of a character's stream of consciousness, Mr. Wood narrates his own enriching verities in this gracefully written, witty and hyperintelligent critique.

Walton Muyumba is a writer and professor in Dallas.

James Wood

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24)