Pre-order your copy of my forthcoming novel Cyan Magenta Yellow Black here. You will be among the first to receive the book—and you will help the press. You can also read an excerpt here.

Recent Writing

Ambivalence Cafe (Great River Review): an essay about being 17 in Winona, Minnesota in 1976 and creating imaginary Rolling Stones albums, and about the role of music in shaping who we are. Find it here.

Hope’s Propulsive Sinews (Notre Dame Magazine): a meditation on hope that begins with a consideration of Margaret Atwood and Flannery O’Connor but proceeds to an appreciation of the women who raised me. Find it here.

ABOUT KEVIN

Raised in the farm country and river towns of southeastern Minnesota, Kevin Fenton lives in St Paul with his wife Ellen and his greyhound Evie. He got a slightly better education than he deserved at Beloit College, the University of Minnesota Law School, and the University of Minnesota MFA program. He works in advertising.  

What I’m Reading

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Note: I found this review, which I wrote for publication but never sent out, in some folders. I can’t speak for how it reads, but it still feels relevant.

It is impossible to approach James Wood without prejudice. In my case, this meant that I thought he was brilliant but too bookish, too snobbish, and, despite his very public atheism, too fundamentalist in his rigidity. Reading some of his New Republic reviews, it was hard to escape the sense that there was a way in which fiction was written and if you–Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie–failed to follow it, you were banished without so much as an “on the other hand.”

An obvious problem with the above criticism is that it is barely disguised jealousy.  Oh, yes, and it is also mostly wrong.  

Of course, “too bookish” is a bizarre charge to make against a book reviewer. But the real problem with the charge of bookishness is that, as applied to How Fiction Works, it isn’t true.  After discussing metaphors by Hardy, Lawrence, and Mansfield, among others, Wood writes, “In New York City, the garbage collectors call maggots ‘disco rice.’ “That sentence is as unpretentious and plugged into the modern world as anything in Nick Hornby. Wood also drops plenty of references to pop culture, which is what passes for life in contemporary America. 

How Fiction Works answers the question:  Why is the book pretty much always better than the movie?  Novels are better because they give us consciousness. Whereas the stuff of drama is action, the stuff of poetry is language, and the stuff of essay is thought, the stuff of fiction is consciousness and consciousness includes all of these things, marinating into a self. :“In the novel we can see the self better than any literary form has yet allowed.”

To get at the workings of fictional form, Wood explores example after example. In the wonderfully titled chapter “A Brief History of Consciousness,” he writes of Macbeth: 

 . . . when Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost, Lady Macbeth twice leans over to him, and attempts to strengthen his resolve. We have to imagine the characters almost whispering to each other in the presence of their guests. “What, quite unmanned in folly? Says Lady Macbeth. “If I stand here, I saw him,” replies Macbeth. “Fie, for shame!” is the fierce spousal reprisal. This is always awkward when acted on stage, because the attendant lords must murmur in the background–in an unconvincing, stagy way– as if they cannot hear what is being said. The privacy of the marital conversation is what poses a theatrical difficulty. Where, onstage, can it realistically happen? I think Shakespeare is essentially being a novelist at such points.

The novel hasn’t swallowed all other literary forms. The poet has access to more vivid language, the dramatist to more powerful spectacle, the essayist to more lucid thought. But the novelist has a kind of All Areas Access to the human soul.

Wood turns himself to the question: how does one make use of this pass? 

To that end, Wood explores narrating, detail, character, language, dialog, and convention.  Some of these are more important than others. He argues that the triumph of the modern novel, which begins in Flaubert, is the free indirect style, an amazingly elastic way of writing that allows both the author and the character to thrive on the page. In the chapter on character he begins an observation, amazingly, “Because I am not sure what a character is . . . “

So much for Wood as fundamentalist law giver.

In fact, the very shape of How Fiction Works reinforces the basic openness of Wood’s thought in this book.  The numbered sections allow him to make necklaces of observations without insisting that they cohere. In effect, a man who loves the novel has borrowed its meandering, digressive, accumulating, inherently humble form. 

The last chapter addresses the tendency of realism to calcify into conventionality. Its last paragraph asserts, “The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always act as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped . . ..” For an aspiring writer, I cannot imagine a more inspiring statement. 

James by Percival Everett

Craft terms such as “point of view” can shrink into technicalities, political terms such as “privileging a viewpoint” can soften into buzzwords, and, at least if you’re in my business (advertising), every new invocation of the power of storytelling can make you gag a little.

In Percival Everett’s James, which retells the story of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective, those terms solidify into profundities. As a fiction writer, you are constantly thinking: This is why point of view matters; this is why stories matter. But you’re also thinking: What’s going to happen next? Will these people I care about be okay? How will they get out of this?

It works as moral experience because it works as a story.

The Fight by Jennifer Manthey