The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts

Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.

You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.

"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.


The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.


The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.

This book is a series of newspaper articles, and it shows. There is a great deal in here that casts light on topics such as Stream of Consciousness, Magic Realism, Intertextuality, Epiphany and Metafiction. Despite this, it is not difficult to read. Most of the examples are interesting and some of them are funny. The author gives sufficient detail about the novels from which they are taken without spoiling the books if you want to read them later. Because it is a collection of articles, you encounter a number of separate insights rather than coming to understand a central theme. You would need to be a writer or a student or at any rate someone with a studious approach to reading to enjoy it. It is not a book for the general reader.