Word: fiction
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...That's about it for the plot of this 72 min. movie. But in The Exiles, the texture is the text. Few fiction or nonfiction films nail the sense of place and time as palpably as this one does. We're in the late '50s, when TV had come into even the poorest homes and a gallon of gas cost 30 cents. We get a glimpse of the Victorian houses that had once been Bunker Hill's elitist pride and were now slum abodes. The Angels Flight railway, the movie theater, the Ritz Bar are seen in their full functioning...
...Presumably unable to afford clearances for pop songs, Mackenzie papered the soundtrack with rock and doo-wop numbers written by Anthony Hilder and performed by his group The Revels (one of whose songs, "Comanche," is played in Pulp Fiction.) All the dialogue from TV shows and movies, all the commercials and DJ patter, Mackenzie's team made that up too. Nearly four years after it was begun, the film had its premiere at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and was bought by a U.S. distributor, but it was licensed only in a 16mm version to schools and churches. It never...
...understand what he's talking about, the anecdotes still slay you. In other words, you don't have to know what free indirect discourse is to read it, because you already know how to read it. Which raises the question: Do we really need to know How Fiction Works...
Books about how to read fiction are a thriving business. This summer also brings us Thomas C. Foster on How to Read Novels Like a Professor (Harper; 304 pages) and John Mullan on How Novels Work (Oxford; 346 pages), though Wood, as a book critic for the New Yorker, is the heavyweight of the field. These books fall into the curious netherworld of extra-academic literary theory. They are the last, depleted descendants of what used to be called aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that theorized the human response to works of art. For most intents and purposes, aesthetics collapsed...
...point of How Fiction Works is supposed to be Wood's theory of the novel. And yes, we dutifully make the rounds of narration, dialogue and so on, topics that inspire in even the most passionate reader a special, pure kind of boredom. But as Wood himself observes, "The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it." The novel is corrosive to systematic thought--whatever is good about it is precisely that increment that resists theorization. The great pleasure of Wood's book lies in the examples, not the points they...