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James Wood's How Fiction Works arrives with a title that dares you to call its bluff, and for roughly two-thirds of its compact 250 pages it makes good on the claim. Presented in 140 numbered sections across eleven chapters, the book is best understood as a slim primer in the lineage of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel - a working critic's attempt to lift the bonnet on the realist novel and name the parts. The numbered format is not a gimmick. It lets Wood, as he admits, dart between ideas, double back, and occasionally contradict himself without having to pretend he is building a system.

Where the book genuinely earns its title is in its treatment of free indirect style. Wood's patient unpacking of how third-person narration can absorb a character's language while retaining the author's irony is the clearest prose I have read on the subject, and the Flaubert chapter that sits at its centre is the highlight of the whole volume. His chapter on detail is almost as good, particularly the argument that the telling detail is the one that briefly makes a character's thinking visible. When Wood quotes Dickens describing a man with legs so long he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else, or slows down to examine a single sentence of Chekhov, you feel the full force of a critic who has spent decades reading at very close range.

The limitations are real and become harder to ignore as the book progresses. Wood is frank that his interest in plot is minimal - he calls it juvenile - and this creates a blind spot where questions of structure, allegory and symbolic design ought to live. Novels that work by deliberate patterning rather than Flaubertian surface, from Invisible Man to the wilder reaches of D. H. Lawrence, sit awkwardly with the method or fall outside it entirely. His pet terms "lifeness" and "this-ness" do a lot of work for concepts that remain slightly fuzzy, and the occasional close reading feels wilful, most notably a reading of a watermelon in Chekhov as mere temporal filler when the detail is doing obvious character work. The centre of gravity also sits firmly in the nineteenth century. For a book written in the present tense about how fiction works now, the contemporary novel receives surprisingly glancing attention.

There is a broader worry, too, which has grown louder since publication. Because the book has become a near-standard text in creative writing programmes, its quiet promotion of one mode of reading - Flaubertian, psychological, suspicious of excess - has come to feel prescriptive rather than descriptive. Wood is not responsible for his imitators, but the book reads differently once you notice how much of current literary taste it has helped to set.

None of which cancels what the book does well. As an introduction to how realist prose actually operates at the sentence level, it remains the best short book of its kind since Forster. Read the chapters on narration, detail and dialogue closely, treat the later material on realism and truth more warily, and use the reading list at the back as the genuine gift it is.