Word: wood
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Sixty-one-year-old Rolling Stone RONNIE WOOD runs off with 18-year-old Russian waitress...
...fiction works (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 265 pages), James Wood tells a story from Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, a novel that since its publication in 1932 has probably been read by only two people, namely James Wood and Joseph Roth. A military officer visits his servant, who is on his deathbed. When the officer enters, the old servant tries to click his heels together, even though he is under the covers and his feet are bare. It's a moment of deep, lancing pathos, when you seem to take in both characters' entire lives for an instant...
...Wood cites this anecdote--and, in a bravura display, four others that are just as poignant--in support of a technical point he's making about free indirect discourse and characterization. The funny thing about it is that even if you don't 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...
...morning in August I couldn't drag her anymore. She buried herself right there on the beach. Broke up under her own weight. The sand really did close up over her. I found the mound it made years later and dug. You could still smell the wet wood in the discolored sand underneath. But there was no boat there any more. Reduced to tiny particles. It's what happens to man-made things, around salty water...