#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as ‘a novelistic character’. There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes. Some of them are solid enough that we can speculate about their motives.
But there are scores of fictional characters who are not fully or conventionally evoked who are also alive and vivid. The solid, nineteenth-century fictional character (I count Biswas in that company) who confronts us with deep mysteries is not the ‘best’ or ideal or only way to create character (though it does not deserve the enormous condescension of postmodernism).

Character 68
摘于06/30/2026