A Not So Common Reader

In the second of two short prefaces to “How Fiction Works,” an old-fashioned primer on literature that also functions as a timely primer on the art of modest self-marketing, the esteemed critic James Wood reaches out to assure “the common reader” (that good fellow from the club who tries to keep up with all things cultural but is forever slightly short on time) that his prose is as free as he can make it of what James Joyce termed “the true scholastic stink” of so much academic writing.

After noting his intellectual debts to “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky” and “the French formalist-­cum-structuralist Roland Barthes,” Wood goes on to compare his “little volume” to the Victorian critic John Ruskin’s musings on the Renaissance painter Tintoretto. Finally, to make himself even less intimidating, even more approachable, Wood (who writes these days for The New Yorker) has us know that every passage he cites in demonstration of his theories comes from “the books at hand in my study” rather than, as the common reader might fear, the entire New York Public Library or, even more distressing, his memory.

The full piece can be read at the New York Times online.