The Language of Fiction : The Craft of Writing and the Pleasures of Reading

What makes the prose in great novels work? Renowned critic Robert Alter reflects on celebrated novels, developing an engaging account of the techniques and devices that transform words into literature. At a moment when we are inundated by machine-generated imitations, The Language of Fiction offers a master class in originality and literary style.

Elements of literary style are often hidden in plain sight. A foremost literary critic and translator reveals how novelists transformed language to create great fiction that is enjoyable to read—and reread. What distinguishes the prose of great novels? How have celebrated novelists from Henry Fielding and Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, Saul Bellow, and Louise Erdrich shaped and sometimes distorted language to make it a lasting source of insight and aesthetic pleasure? In The Language of Fiction, Robert Alter introduces literary devices and techniques novelists have used to write fiction that is illuminating, surprising, and a delight to read. Focusing on well-chosen passages from works of beloved novels, Alter takes readers on a guided tour through the writing of Jane Austen, Saul Bellow, Willa Cather, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, Henry Fielding, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov, Ann Patchett, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and more. With his characteristic clarity and sensitivity, Alter shows how these writers make use of word choice, metaphor, rhythm, perspective, and syntax in crafting the language of their novels. He carefully explains, for example, how James Joyce introduces invented words in Ulysses to represent the mind of a husband tormented by the thought of his wife’s unfaithfulness, how Willa Cather uses figuration in her otherwise austere O Pioneers! to establish the felt world in which her story will unfold, and how Ann Patchett uses shifting perspectives in Bel Canto to explore the multifaceted character of language. At a moment when we are inundated by machine-generated texts, The Language of Fiction offers a master class in literary style—something computers can imitate but not create. And as reading for pleasure is said to be in decline, Alter offers an ode to literary language and a timely reminder of the pleasures to be found between the pages of a great novel.