He isn’t using the word in the sense of “operates” or “functions.” He isn’t meaningfully interested in technique. The second reason is that he’s really using the word “works” in a secondary sense of the term. Nobody else is writing about literature with anything like his pop and verve. He is in full confidence and he should be. The first is that he’s a cocky son-of-a-bitch at the top of his game and he’s ready to make serious claims. Wood calls his book How Fiction Works for two reasons. In the Preface to How Fiction Works Wood writes, “when I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about character, and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.” For James Wood, fiction is about the world, not about itself. To be obsessed with the mechanics of words and sentences, to see literature as essentially an enclosed system with internal rules, is to be a formalist, and James Wood, for all his formality, isn’t a formalist. How Fiction Works isn’t actually about how fiction works.
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