Review - The Art of Fiction by David Lodge

As with all of the titles in the Books on Writing Section, The Art of Fiction certainly isn't essential reading. As a matter of fact, if you are still grappling with the craft of novel writing, this one can be safely left on the shelf for now. If you are feeling adventurous and wish to take your fiction studies further, I can't recommend this book enough.

The fifty articles in The Art of Fiction were originally published in the Independent on Sunday and the Washington Post newspapers in the early 1990s. They have now been expanded, revised and collected in book form.

Each article takes the form of an extract from a well-known literary work and commentary. The comments talk about the extract itself and about a particular fiction writing issue more broadly. Some of these issues are familiar:

• Mystery
• The Comic Novel
• Narrative Structure

Others are more abstract:

• Intertextuality
• Teenage Skaz
• Aporia

(That's why I don't recommend the book for absolute beginners!)

To give you a taste of what to expect, here are a couple of extracts from Lodge's book. The first one is taken from the article called "Implication":

A truly exhaustive description of any event is impossible; from which it follows that all novels contain gaps and silences which the reader must fill, in order to "produce the text" (as poststructuralist critics say). But in some cases these gaps and silences are the result of unconscious evasions or suppressions on the writer's part (and no less interesting for that) while in others they are a conscious artistic strategy, to imply rather than state meaning.
   Implication is a particularly useful technique in the treatment of sexuality. The novel has always been centrally concerned with erotic attraction and desire, but until recently the explicit description of sexual acts in literary fiction was prohibited.

The second extract comes from "Coincidence":

There is always a trade-off in the writing of fiction between the achievement of structure, pattern and closure on the one hand, and the imitation of life's randomness inconsequentiality and openness on the other. Coincidence, which surprises us in real life with symmetries we don't expect to find there, is all too obviously a structural device in fiction, and an excessive reliance on it can jeopardize the verisimilitude of a narrative.

Like I say, The Art of Fiction can be safely ignored until you are farther along in your novel writing career and feel you are ready for it. Once you are, it will provide you with plenty of food for thought, even if you don't agree with everything the author says.