Metaphysical Parenting 
James Wood
These days, God-like authorial omniscience is permitted only if God is a sweet ghost, the kind with whom the residents can peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short stories, where the narrator may be wildly unreliable (first person) or reliably invisible (third person), but not wildly visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practises in A House for Mr Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives, or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr Biswas lived six years at The Chase, years so squashed by their own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom?
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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
Credulity · ‘Life of Pi’
Bohumil Hrabal · the life, times, letters and politics of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal
Damaged Beasts · Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
The Lie-World · D.B.C. Pierre
A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory · David Bezmozgis
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