#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality-level. In such cases, our appetite is quickly disappointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author for not giving us enough - the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough. Yet we would not dream of accusing Sebald or Woolf or Roth - none of whom is especially interested in creating character in the solid, old-fashioned nineteenth-century sense - of letting us down in this way, because they have so finely tutored us in their own conventions, their own expansive limitations, to be satisfied with just what they give us.

I would be quite happy to abolish the very idea of ‘roundness’ in characterisation, because it tyrannises us - readers, novelists, critics - with an impossible ideal. ‘Roundness’ is impossible in fiction, because fictional characters, while very alive in their way, are not the same as real people. It is subtlety that matters- subtlety of analysis, of enquiry, of concern, of felt pressure - and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do.

Character 75,79
摘于07/01/2026