When I got my degree in comparative literature, I never thought that I would end up doing anything so tacky as actually comparing literature. Then I became a critic.

We're a funny lot, an arcane guild. We come to the field out of a catholic (not Catholic) enthusiasm for literature and aspire to cool, benevolent, even-handed judgment. We run the gamut from kind and encouraging to the literary equivalent of Monty Python's gangster Dinsdale Piranha, who was always vicious but fair. The best of us strive to write reviews that are as artful and enjoyable as the fiction we critique.

While we frame our arguments as transparently as we can, there is no set of scales more idiosyncratic than those upon which we weigh our objects of study. We come fully equipped with prejudices and preferences, bugbears and buttons that are easily pushed. We like to be surprised but we know what we like.

So when a leading critic sits down and writes a wee literary manifesto, he provides not only a handy guide for readers of book reviews, but a deliciously inky Rorschach blot for writers of them. Hence the illuminating critical flurry around the slim but augustly titled How Fiction Works, by James Wood, wunderkind reviewer at The Guardian and The New Republic, lately promoted to the pages of The New Yorker and professor of practical criticism at Harvard.

The quibbles and cavils began as soon as the book landed, starting with the title, which many find willfully misleading. Given Wood's focus on the belle-lettristic 19th and 20th century novel and his near total shunning of popular fiction, How The Sort of Fiction I Like Works might be a more honest title, but the emphasis on "works" is right. The book is not so much a "how-to" as a "how-does."

As Wood works his way through an impressive range of examples, we get the picture: He's an obsessive tinkerer who really likes to get under the hood. This is the "Car Talk" of literary studies: It's all about the details.

For Wood, it's not about which book changed your life, but which sentence. What he does very well is take apart paragraphs and sentences to reveal their machinery in a series of brief meditations—not even chapters, really—on the subjects of narrators, details, character, how time passes in a novel and how a novelist furnishes a world.

In genial prose, buttressed by academic flourishes and punctuated with exclamations via metaphors that sometimes sing and sometimes sink, Wood strives to explain the realism effect, the sweet complicity between reader and writer that for the duration of a novel, its world is real, populated by people who behave in realistic ways. Most persuasive are his negative examples of authors, notably John Updike, but also a bevy of younger writers who puncture that complicity by over-egging the pudding.

This is an old-fashioned view of fiction. Most other reviews of Wood's book point out with varying degrees of asperity that fiction encompasses a far wider range of effects than conventional realism. Wood has little time for prose that strikes any pose other than Flaubertian. That's like writing an art book that extols paint only for how it can best produce a portrait or a landscape; there's no room for Pollocks or Cezannes in such a cosmology.

It is also undeniable that Wood neglects the larger picture: story. For all his erudition and for all the pages turned in pursuit of his exquisite theories of the finer points of literature, he seems not to know the meaning of the word "page-turner," of plot for its own sake, or how character is revealed in action as much as in reflection. Instead, he seems content to swoon voluptuously over the surface of the text, its textures and colors, an aesthete to the core.

There's nothing wrong with that. The critical response can only be personal, which is why critics have had so much fun reviewing this earnest, intelligent and cranky little book. The problem with the overambitious title is easily solved by adding a simple preposition between title and author: How Fiction Works For James Wood. Don't agree with his version? Write your own.