She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. Wood not only identifies this device, correctly, as a cliché marking the writer as a greenhorn, but also cooks up a parody just plausible enough to seduce you before stinging: "My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant.
I guess I'd always thought, for instance, that maybe it wasn't too lame to kick off a novel or story with a description of a photograph. James Wood's new book, "How Fiction Works," is as knowing as you'd expect from one of the best critics alive-more knowing than that, in fact-but that may not always please writers, since Wood also knows how fiction doesn ' t work.
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