April 16, 2018 Issue

For me, the most absorbing piece in this week’s issue is James Wood’s “Long Road Ahead,” a review of Walter Kempowski’s novel All for Nothing. To say that I’m a fan of Wood’s criticism is an understatement. I’m crazy about it. Of the seven hundred and thirty-six posts I’ve written for this blog, one hundred are tagged with his name, more than any other writer. The next closest is Ian Frazier, with eighty-nine. Wood is a formalist; he analyzes style. That’s what I like most about his work. That he prefers fiction to fact is an annoyance I’ve learned to live with. Many of his critical points are applicable to fiction and nonfiction alike (e.g., his theory of detail). In “Long Road Ahead,” he provides an interesting variation on his notion of “free indirect speech”:

One reason that Kempowski’s interrogative prose has a strange air of detachment is that the words have indeed detached themselves from the characters. Two people bend over the map, each with different anxieties, but who is thinking these thoughts about the Russians? Hirsch, Katharina, Kempowski, or all three? Most of “All for Nothing” is written in free indirect discourse, which is to say that the novelist’s prose closely identifies itself with the perspective and the language of a particular character. But here the questions appear to be voiced by a chorus. The effect is a kind of uncertain omniscience, which allows the novelist not only to move easily among his characters but to blend their thoughts, when need be, into a collective anxiety. It’s a modern epic style. 

Wood has written about free indirect speech before: see, for example, his great How Fiction Works (2008). And I’ve found examples of it in fact pieces (see my post on Lizzie Widdicombe’s “Happy Together,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2016). But in the above-quoted passage, he identifies a new form of it – free indirect speech “voiced by a chorus.” I can’t think of a nonfiction example of it. But from now on, I’ll definitely be watching for it.