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Miss Brodie and Professor Pnin turn out to be particular
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http://www.observer.com/2008/our-critic-s-tip-sheet-current-reading-3
Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading [ ... ]
by Adam Begley | January 28, 2008
[ ... ]
JAMES WOOD, HARVARD’S Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism, is not cited by Ms. Faust—but the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) last week gave us a taste of his forthcoming book, How Fiction Works, which Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish in July. The 4,000-word excerpt takes up the issue of characterization, with special attention to E.M. Forster’s familiar distinction between “flat” and “round” characters. Along the way he gives brief, perceptive readings of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. Mr. Wood is in a mellow, open-armed mood: “The truth is,” he writes, “that 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.” But he does eventually declare a preference—“My own taste tends towards the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows”—and Miss Brodie and Professor Pnin turn out to be particular favorites.
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