Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and Henry James's What Maisie Knew are celebrated examples, and Wood adds Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno to the list. What is point of view, and how does it work?" He begins with "point of view" and the case, not so special as some think, of the "unreliable narrator." To tell a story from the point of view of somebody who does not understand it, or for other reasons misrepresents it, may seem merely perverse, but unreliability can be a matter of art. Wood wants to ask some "essential questions": "Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character?.
It is true that some of Wood's critical procedures somewhat resemble Shklovsky's, and his largely unexplained interest in the Russian author may result from that similarity. It may be that few readers will much regret that Wood prefers to do his own thinking, addressing primary texts and readers less anxious to engage with Barthes's neologisms and Shklovsky's preoccupation with the notion of defamiliarization-his belief that it is not the business of fiction (or any art) to provide something conveniently easy to recognize, but rather to create a particular and probably surprising perception, to transform the ordinary in ways he illustrates brilliantly with examples from that well-known realist Tolstoy. He comments, but not as extensively as he usefully could, on S/Z, Barthes's remarkable study of how a novella by Balzac works, but he says only a few words on Shklovsky's essays-for instance, the study called "How Don Quixote Is Made, " a title perhaps echoed in Wood's own. In this one he does usefully borrow some of Barthes's ideas, while contesting his opinion that "realism" has nothing to do with reality, being nothing but a system of conventional codes. Wood announces that his favorite twentieth-century critics of the novel are Viktor Shklovsky and Roland Barthes, but he cites them largely in order to differ from them, gently deploring the difficulties they present to the "common reader." In a longer book (which this one ought to have been) we would hope to learn why these critics won his favor in the first place.
To be fair, one must add that Wood has access to serious studies of fiction and its workings that have become available since Forster's day-mostly in the last half-century, which witnessed the birth of "narratology." Some "narratological" studies are pretentious and dull, but some are not. Wood's conversational style is a modern equivalent of Forster's, but for all its wit and ease of manner, this is a much more substantial study.
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