Product Description

Never has contemporary fiction been more widely discussed and passionately analysed; recent years have seen a huge growth in the number of reading groups and in the interest of a non-academic readership in the discussion of how novels work. Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, 'Elements of Fiction', John Mullan examines novels mostly of the last ten years, many of which have become firm favourites with reading groups. He reveals the rich resources of novelistic technique, setting recent fiction alongside classics of the past. Nick Hornby's adoption of a female narrator is compared to Daniel Defoe's; Ian McEwan's use of weather is set against Austen's and Hardy's; Carole Shield's chapter divisions are likened to Fanny Burney's. Each section shows how some basic element of fiction is used. Some topics (like plot, dialogue, or location) will appear familiar to most novel readers; others (metanarrative, prolepsis, amplification) will open readers' eyes to new ways of understanding and appreciating the writer's craft. How Novels Work explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist. It is an entertaining and stimulating exploration of that ingenuity. Addressed to anyone who is interested in the close reading of fiction, it makes visible techniques and effects we are often only half-aware of as we read. It shows that literary criticism is something that all fiction enthusiasts can do. Contemporary novels discussed include: Monica Ali's Brick Lane; Martin Amis's Money; Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin; A.S. Byatt's Possession; Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club; J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace; Michael Cunningham's The Hours; Don DeLillo's Underworld; Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White; Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love; Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections; Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Patricia Highsmith's Ripley under Ground; Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell; Nick Hornby's How to Be Good; Ian McEwan's Atonement; John le Carré's The Constant Gardener; Andrea Levy's Small Island; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; Andrew O'Hagan's Personality; Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red; Ann Patchett's Bel Canto; Ruth Rendell's Adam and Eve and Pinch Me; Philip Roth's The Human Stain; Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated; Carol Shields's Unless; Zadie Smith's White Teeth; Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting; Graham Swift's Last Orders; Donna Tartt's The Secret History; William Trevor's The Hill Bachelors; and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38032 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

The Guardian (Review), 6 January, 2007
A wealth of sharp mini-essays.

Review
It strikes me that none of our readers can afford to be without this book! I'm an admirer of John Mullan's 'Guardian' columns, and this is definately something that we should be reviewing. (Edward Fenton. 'The Oxford Writer )

A brilliant crash course in contemporary fiction (Waterstones Books Quarterly )

About the Author
John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Centur (OUP) and co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: An Antholog (OUP). He has edited several works by Daniel Defoe and has written widely on eighteenth-century fiction. A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for the
Guardian.

Customer Reviews

Informative and entertaining
Amidst the dozens if not hundreds of 'books about books' or literary theory I found Mullan's work a very refreshing read. True enough, it shows that it is based on Mullan's weekly articles for The Guardian and was not from the very beginning conceived of and planned as a book as such, but that doesn't detract from the informed and insightful way Mullan treats his subject matter. On the contrary, I found it all the more easy to read and - if need be - lay aside for a while to resume reading some days or weeks later, as all the pieces are 'bite-sized'.

In a little over 80 articles, as diverse as 'the anti-hero', 'weather', 'plot' or 'intertextuality', Mullan treats the following subjects:
- Beginning
- Narrating
- People
- Genre
- Voices
- Structure
- Detail
- Style
- Devices
- Literariness
- Ending

By no means will you find in this book an exhaustive treatment of the above-subjects, but all in all this still is a very good book to give you a good enough grasp of 'how novels work' to read them with all the more pleasure afterwards.

The laypersons guide to the novel.
This book is aimed directly at the interested reader as opposed to the scholar and works better for it. Of course, some will want deeper links to literary theory and a gretaer range of discussion but if, like so many, you read novels for pleasure as opposed to study and simply wish to know a little more as to how writers create the effects and emotions they do, then this is the book for you.

John Mullan does a superb job of guiding you through certain techniques used by writers to present their stories. Any complex theories are alluded to in clear, understandable language. For some this may dilute the quality but again, this book is aimed at the more 'general reader' who is perhaps less interested in the complexities of the theory itself and more interested in why the novels they read work as they do.

I would recommend this to any reader of fiction who is perplexed at how writers are able to move us as they do.

A book about how novels work that doesn't
In his introduction John Mullan makes the important point that "space for quotation is one of the necessary privileges of criticism" and promises "to show how a critical vocabulary can make our opinions lucid." Unfortunately, my initial and perhaps somewhat naive enthusiasm that I was about to learn a whole lot of new and exciting things about how novels work soon deflated into indifference as I read on: the quotations rarely sparked my interest and the only critical vocabulary around was generated by me.

Anyone who's tried to write a review of a novel for this website knows how hard it can be. The difficulty lies in finding even a few hundred words to do justice to a few hundred thousand, to figure out why it either did or didn't work. In going from one novel to the whole of literature, the task not only becomes daunting for even someone as obviously well-read as Mullan. It also risks losing that personal edge. Mullan has the luxury of over 300 pages and focuses on the mechanics of "narrating", "voices", "structure", etc., but to what end? Although technical reasons might sometimes explain why a particular novel fails to grab us, it's doubtful they can adequately account for a novel's capacity to engage us emotionally as well as intellectually. It is telling that "emotion" does not appear in the index and does not feature as a section heading (while those perennial concerns of many readers - "Intertextuality" and "Heteroglossia" - do). Hamlet caught the mystery of how fiction works when he wondered how Hecuba could make the player weep. This book is more of a Hamlyn guide to the gearbox.

Mullan draws on a wide range of authors, and there is always the danger of dilution to the point of superficiality, if not absurdity. For example, he introduces Carol Shields as "a modern observer of ordinary women". Within a few lines, however, we learn that the "eldest of Reta's three daughters" in her novel "Unless" has dropped out of university and become a silent beggar. Hardly "ordinary". Elsewhere, he claims that literary novelists such as Julian Barnes and Iain Banks "often dabble in genre fiction - for the sales". No evidence from the authors is presented for this view, and it doesn't ring true. (In fact, I think Iain Banks tried getting his science fiction published without success until he broke through with the bestselling and "literary" Wasp Factory - the complete opposite of what Mullan is claiming.)

At one point I felt sorry that he has to read books (sorry, "texts") of literary theory on grim topics like narratology. (Such books, apparently, "often contain diagrams of the narratives they analyse".) Mullan's dry response to Mieke Bal's stunning insight that the "character is not a human being, but it resembles one" is "Just so." By including such an asinine remark in the first place, however, he accords it too much respect. Perhaps academic literary theorists - inappropriately aping the the third-person objectivity of the physical sciences - sacrifice their subjective responses and are afraid to talk about what really matters, which is whether a novel touches your soul or leaves you cold. The irony is, reading any decent scientist on how atoms work, how the mind works, how language works, will leave you both fascinated by the subject and envious of their profession. You will also be in no doubt that they love their work. The terrible conclusion after reading even a few chapters of "How Novels Work" is that, if this is what constitutes "understanding" in the world of literary criticism, I'd rather remain in ignorance.