"The Art of Fiction" is essential, thoroughly entertaining reading for writers, students and anyone who wants to understand how literature works. The articles by David Lodge, which first appeared in the "Independent on Sunday", are expanded here and consider the subject under a wide range of headings such as 'The Intrusive Author', 'Suspense' and 'Magic Realism'. Styles and techniques are illustrated in each case by passages from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, Lodge also demonstrates the richness and variety of British and American fiction.

About the Author

David Lodge has written many bestselling novels, including THINKS and NICE WORK. His books have sold well over a million copies in Penguin. Formerly Professor of English at Birmingham University, he now writes full-time. He continues to live in Birmingham.

Reviews

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 London Independent . 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 flavor 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.'' Lodge may be working a bit below full capacity here, but apart from serving as a genial companion, he defines terms of the novelist's craft so deftly and concisely that this pleasurable browse could rescue (or replace) many a college syllabus. (July)