Customer Reviews
Indispensable for the novelist - By: Michael J. Hunt, 14 Dec 2007 
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, & you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', & move on. It's only when you've actuallly 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 & you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you & that, in some cases, they have been lauded & 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 & he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer & reader.
Interesting and insightful - By: J. Aitcheson, 09 Jul 2007 
"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' & 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' & 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel & 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 & digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read & follow & he occasionallly intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, & 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, & Victorian writers such as Brontë & Dickens, alll the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell & Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read alll - 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, & 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, & 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.
Interesting and insightful - By: J. Aitcheson, 23 Jun 2007 "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' & 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' & 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel & 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 & digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read & follow & he occasionallly intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, & 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, & Victorian writers such as Brontë & Dickens, alll the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell & Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read alll - 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, & 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, & 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.
Modest and magisterial - By: jfp2006, 25 Sep 2006 This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originallly conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding & 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 academicallly slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionallly more than one] from novels, or, occasionallly, 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 & nineteenth centuries & into American & Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, alllegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, & the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overalll result is both modest & magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in smalll doses, a book to browse in, & dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of alll, 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 alll of its own.
Interesting but inconclusive - By: Reptile, 17 May 2006 This book is a series of newspaper articles, & it shows. There is a great deal in here that casts light on topics such as Stream of Consciousness, Magic Realism, Intertextuality, Epiphany & Metafiction. Despite this, it is not difficult to read. Most of the examples are interesting & 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.
