#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
But the book’s form is unconventional, and perfectly supports and shapes those elements of the book’s content that are also somewhat unconventional.

So the book, like its narrator, faces in many directions at once, and shows different colours to the light. It’s an account of a marriage in distress but also a song in praise of marriage. It’s tartly honest about the frequent boredom and fatigue of being a parent, yet it also understands all the joys and consolations of being a parent. If it laments the work that has not been done - this woman who could have been a great ‘art monster’ - it also embodies the work that has been finely done, for Dept. of Speculation is that archetypal modernist and postmodernist document: a successful novel about the difficulty of writing a successful novel.
And it is the novel’s form that allows for this lovely, complex variety of elements.
第100节, 读起来华丽流畅, 忍不住做了摘录, 其实不见得理解他到底在说什么, 因为没读过Dept. of Speculation。

Plot is really just practical form - the form the writer creates, as he or she is creating a work of fiction (working through authorial choices having to do with who is narrating the story, how to arrange all the elements, pacing, and so on). Moral form is the finished outline, the significant shape we can discern of a plot, the sense we make of something once we are able to hold that plot in our minds.

FORM 100,101
摘于07/15/2026 #分别善恶知识树上的果子#