An important - and delicious-to-read - guide to fiction. David Lodge uses interesting and significant examples from classic and modern fiction in English to show the reader the essencial aspects of the theory of literature. Both readers and would-be writers will find it useful. ( )

Possibly the best guide to how fiction works for the intelligent amateur. Accessible without being patronising; erudite without being pompous; even-handed without being bland. ( )

British novelist Lodge ( Paradise News ) retired in 1987 from Birmingham University's English faculty and swore off academic prose, but in 1991 he consented to contribute a series of columns "of interest to a more general reading public" to the Independent Newspaper. Each of these 50 essays begins with a brief fiction passage, addressed and interpreted topically by Lodge, who discusses point of view, the unreliable narrator, "the uncanny," "weather" and other aspects of writing. For example, in Chapter 19, "Repetition," he observes that while Hemingway is famous for the "charged simplicity" of his reiterated words or phrases, repetition brings a special flavour to the work of writers as various as Dickens, Lawrence and Martin Amis--and he proves it. The selections are varied, although perhaps slanted to favor gentility (Austen and Nabokov, not Meredith or Dreiser), and tend to verify the opinion that "the novel has always been centrally concerned with erotic attraction and desire."

David Lodge wrote a series of articles on the art of fiction which were published in The Independent on Sunday in 1991/92, these have been revised, expanded and gathered into book form.
Essential reading for anyone who is interested in how literature works. ( )