More to the point, he is one of the very few critics alive who can engage fiction on its own terms. In fact, there is at least one good reason to read 'How Fiction Works': Wood writes like an angel, with all the austerity and voluptuousness that implies. What, finally, is better for the soul: reading Tolstoy or reading how to read Tolstoy? 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. Surely, if it's doing its job, it need only be experienced. Leavis and Roland Barthes have already tried to explain fiction to us, and it may seem churlish to wonder - after so many fine minds have labored so long at it - if fiction really needs to be explained. Of course, literary figures as great as E.M. To approach the mystery of our own condition, we have to grasp the mystery by which words make worlds.

The sense of holy purpose that rises from all his sentences gathers into mission in 'How Fiction Works,' a book-length essay that takes its cue from George Eliot: 'Art is the nearest thing to life.' Wood likes that line so much, he uses it twice, and in each case, the implication is the same. Or, at any rate, a better reader, which, in Wood's metaphysics, is practically the same thing.

James Wood makes me want to be a better man.

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