Lodge uses an example from Martin Amis’s Money (1984), where a narrator struggles to navigate Los Angeles on foot, to illustrate fiction’s power to keenly evoke a setting. Vivid as the description is, Lodge argues that an evocative sense of place arrived relatively late in prose fiction. As the critic Mikhail Bakhtin noted, cities are interchangeable in classical romance, and early English novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding described London in terms of social class rather than sensory texture. A contrast between a passage from Fielding’s Tom Jones (1748) and Charles Dickens’s description of Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist (1838) illustrates the shift that Romanticism brought, turning attention to the effect of environment on human beings and to the symbolic weight of cityscapes.

Amis is positioned as a modern heir to Dickens’s urban Gothic tradition, one in which settings feel more animated than the people inhabiting them. The narrator of Money, John Self, is a crude, consumerist yuppie commuting between England and America to close a film deal. The novel’s central stylistic challenge is rendering urban decay expressively while remaining faithful to Self’s narrow perspective; Amis solves this by concealing literary sophistication behind slang, profanity, and mid-Atlantic jokes.

Hyperbole is the passage’s governing device: exaggerated riffs on Los Angeles as a city wholly surrendered to the automobile, on American retail specialization, and on “immigrant taxi drivers” who can’t find their way. Varied verbal moods—indicative, interrogative, imperative—and the generalizing second-person pronoun keep the reader actively engaged rather than lulled by conventional descriptive prose.

In this chapter, Lodge examines the expressive potential of lists in fiction, which can be vehicles of characterization and meaning. To bring home this potential, Lodge uses an excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934), describing Nicole Diver’s Paris shopping spree. For Lodge, the list of items that Nicole buys establishes that beyond a certain threshold, the quantity of money produces a qualitative difference in character and life.

Fitzgerald’s approach is contrasted with the “sex and shopping” novel genre. He creates an impression of extravagance through a miscellaneous, non-hierarchical catalog—cheap beads alongside a gold-and-ivory chess set, honey alongside a rubber alligator—invoking only one brand name. The absence of logic or hierarchy in the list conveys Nicole’s generosity, impulsiveness, and disconnection from practical reality; her purchase of two identical jackets in different colors makes the point economically.

Balancing this first list is a second: a series of verbal phrases cataloging the laborers—factory workers, plantation hands, department-store girls—whose exploitation underwrites Nicole’s spending. The pivot sentence, “Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil” (61), recasts her as a commodity rather than a consumer. More metaphorical in register, the second list draws on railway imagery echoing Dickens, and its ambiguous “fireman” metaphor is read as betraying Fitzgerald’s own conflicted attitude toward the wealthy.

Lodge further examines fiction’s ability to absorb nonfictional forms, such as lists, charts, and catalogues, by analyzing examples from Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938), where the heroine Celia’s measurements appear as a statistical table, and Lorrie Moore’s “How To Be an Other Woman” (1985), where a narrator’s list-making becomes a strategy of rivalry with her lover’s absent wife.

An excerpt from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) shows the first appearance of Sally Bowles—she arrives late, immediately commandeers the telephone, and performs an affected conversation with a lover while the narrator observes her green-painted fingernails, poorly coordinated makeup, and grubby hands. Arguing that character is the novel’s most important element, Lodge traces Sally’s unlikely cultural longevity through stage and film adaptations, including I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret. Her appeal lies not in beauty or talent but in the comic distance between her pretensions and her circumstances, as well as in an underlying innocence that her Weimar Berlin setting elevates into an emblem of a doomed society.

The traditional method of character introduction—a full physical and biographical portrait, as in George Eliot’s depiction of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871)—is contrasted with the modern preference for gradual revelation through action and speech. Both rely on synecdoche: A few carefully chosen details stand for the whole. Sally’s black silk outfit and immediate telephone performance signal theatricality and provocativeness before a word of description is offered. This cinematic approach—what Henry James called the “scenic method”—reflects the influence of film on Isherwood’s generation, and Sally’s introduction can be broken into a sequence of distinct shots.

What film cannot replicate, however, are the narrator’s literary asides: the ironic note that her green nail polish was unfortunately chosen, a phrase that encapsulates Sally’s entire pattern of misguided choices, and the narrator’s comparison of her dirty hands to those of a little girl—a detail that reveals the childlike quality making her memorable.

Lodge explores the narrative function of the literary element of surprise, a variation of Aristotle’s concept of peripeteia: sudden reversal, often paired with discovery. In classical drama, based on known stories and myths, the peripeteia playing out on the stage surprises the character rather than the audience, producing a sense of irony, such as in the messenger scene in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (400s BCE), where Oedipus learns of his incest. In fresh narratives, writers have to create this peripetia through a series of effects, as Lodge describes through an excerpt from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848).

The quoted passage presents Sir Pitt Crawley, an elderly baronet, dropping to his knees to propose marriage to Becky Sharp, a penniless governess, who then reveals that she’s already married. As Lodge notes, the Vanity Fair scene delivers layered reversals: Becky is astonished by the proposal; Sir Pitt and the reader are astonished by her prior marriage. Because the scene concluded the fourth installment of the novel’s original serial publication, the identity of Becky’s husband remained suspended for some time. The theatrical tableau—the leering old man on his knees, the distraught young woman—functions as a classic curtain line.

Backstory supplies the careful preparation behind the effect. Becky had made herself indispensable to Sir Pitt at his country seat, Queen’s Crawley, and to his wealthy half-sister, Miss Crawley. Unbeknownst to Sir Pitt, Miss Crawley, eager to keep Becky out of the family, had encouraged her nephew Rawdon Crawley to seduce Becky; Rawdon, however, had already married her in secret. After Sir Pitt’s wife dies, he attempts to recover Becky at any cost, leading to his proposal—a revelation withheld until the following chapter’s conclusion.

Thackeray’s irony is that Becky’s tears are genuine, not out of sentiment toward Sir Pitt but because she has unknowingly forfeited the far greater prize of becoming Lady Crawley. Her grief over losing so disreputable a suitor—the narrator describes him as one of the most cunning, mean, and foolish old men in England—serves as a damning verdict on both her character and the mercenary world of the novel.

The author argues that while chronological storytelling is the simplest approach, deviation enables fiction to forge connections of causality and irony between distant events. To illustrate his point, he uses an excerpt from Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which oscillates rapidly between several distinct time periods.

The novel follows Jean Brodie, a charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher between the wars, and her devoted set of pupils: Monica, famous for mathematics; Rose Stanley, famous for sex; and Sandy Stranger, the main point-of-view character. The quoted single short passage moves across five time periods, from the late 1920s main narrative to the late 1950s. In junior school, the girls speculate about whether Miss Brodie is having an affair with Mr. Lloyd, the art master. Sandy later confirms that Monica, who spotted Miss Brodie with Mr. Loyd, was right about the affair since Miss Brodie revealed to Sandy her plan for Rose to serve as her surrogate mistress. Recognizing her teacher’s dangerous egomania, Sandy quashes the scheme by becoming Lloyd’s mistress herself and eventually betrays Miss Brodie to the school authorities for sending another pupil on a fatal expedition to fascist Spain. A scene of a betrayed Miss Brodie taking tea with Sandy after being compulsorily retired appears less than halfway through the novel.

Noting the time shifts in Spark’s novel, Lodge also explores what made it particularly difficult to adapt to screen: While flashback is common in both fiction and film, flashforward (prolepsis), which requires a narrator who already knows the whole story, is harder to achieve in film. This is why the film version of Spark’s novel reduced the story to straightforward chronological order.

The chapter surveys other examples: stream-of-consciousness shifts in Joyce’s Molly Bloom, the memoir structure of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951), and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), where the traumatized Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time” (78), moving between postwar suburban life and the Allied firebombing of Dresden. A poignant image of a war film watched in reverse captures the novel’s wistful meditation on whether time’s damage can be undone. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) extends this conceit by narrating a Nazi war criminal’s life entirely backward.

An excerpt from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) opens the chapter: The narrator sternly rebukes a “Lady” reader for failing to notice a clue about his mother’s religion in the preceding chapter, commanding the reader to go back and reread it. Lodge notes that while all novels have narrators, some, like Tristram Shandy, explicitly include a “narratee.” The narratee is any surrogate for the reader constructed within the text itself—ranging from the Victorian “Dear reader” to the elaborate layered frame of Kipling’s “Mrs. Bathurst.” The narratee is always a rhetorical device for shaping the real reader’s response.

Sterne’s narrator, Tristram Shandy, personifies his reader as a “Lady” or “Gentleman” whom he interrogates, rebukes, and flatters. The missed clue concerns the possibility of baptism in utero: Had Tristram’s mother been a Roman Catholic, certain Sorbonne theologians had approved a method of christening unborn infants, meaning birth before christening wouldn’t have been necessary. Sterne’s apparent digression is in fact a defense of his own method: The Lady is sent away to reread as a rebuke to the habit of reading straight forward only for plot events. Readers who remain are made to feel privileged, allied with an author who demands attention to texture and pattern over incident. The author identifies Tristram Shandy as an anticipation of Modernist poetics, particularly the concept of “spatial form”—the idea that a text’s unity can only be fully perceived through rereading.

Lodge traces weather’s growing prominence in fiction to the late 18th century, linking it to Romanticism’s attention to how the external world mirrors internal states—what John Ruskin termed the “pathetic fallacy,” the projection of human emotions onto natural phenomena. To illustrate the point, excerpts from Austen’s Emma and Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) open the chapter.

According to Lodge, Austen retained a skeptical, Augustan attitude toward such Romantic projection. In her novels, weather is typically a practical matter: The snowstorm in Emma disrupts a dinner party, forces an early departure, and creates the conditions for Mr. Elton’s unwanted declaration of love. Austen does, however, use the pathetic fallacy sparingly: On the worst day of Emma’s life, when she fears Mr. Knightley will marry Harriet, a gloomy summer storm reflects her anguish—though it proves an unreliable portent, as the following day brings sunshine and Mr. Knightley’s proposal to Emma.

Dickens, by contrast, deploys the device openly and at full force in the opening of Bleak House. The personified “[i]mplacable November weather” of London mixes biblical allusions to the Creation and the Flood with post-Darwinian imagery (87), defamiliarizing a realistic cityscape into an apocalyptic vision of civilization reverting to primordial swamp. The fog and mud accumulate—pointedly, at compound interest in the City—and are explicitly linked to the corrupt Court of Chancery presided over by the Lord Chancellor, establishing the moral framework that the novel’s many-stranded plot will then examine.

The chapter opens with the first two paragraphs of Ernest Hemingway’s story “In Another Country” (1927), set in wartime Milan, Italy, which are notable for the dense repetition of both grammatical words and lexical words such as “fall,” “cold,” “wind,” and “hospital.” The author contrasts this with the traditional principle of “elegant variation”—avoiding repeating the same word—and explains Hemingway’s rejection of ornate rhetoric as a philosophical commitment to recording experience directly, without stylistic falsification.

The unspoken keyword behind all the repeated terms is “death.” The American word “fall” carries associations with the dying of vegetation and battlefield casualties; images of dead game outside shop windows tighten these associations; and wind, elsewhere a symbol of life, here conveys lifelessness. The narrator and his companions are soldiers recuperating from wounds, and the hospital—repeated without pronoun substitution—is the center of their existence. Hemingway achieves the emotional force of the pathetic fallacy without recourse to metaphor.

The chapter broadens to contrast uses of repetition. D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) employs incantatory repetition in the manner of Old Testament prose. Dickens uses anaphoric repetition in his denunciation of Jo’s death in Bleak House as an oratorical device. Martin Amis’s Money demonstrates comic repetition: The phrase “go to bed with” cycles through its narrator’s contradictory desires (93), and the passage quoted concludes with a sentence whose final word is “money”—the novel’s thematic keyword—illustrating how repetition at the macro level of an entire novel can function as variation at the micro level of a single paragraph.

Quoting the famous first paragraphs of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Lodge author argues that no universal rules govern fictional prose: Where Hemingway pursued deliberate simplicity, Nabokov cultivated lavish decoration. Lolita takes the form of an extended apologia by its narrator, Humbert Humbert, a child abuser awaiting trial—a man who, in his own words, boasts that a murderer can always be counted on for a “fancy prose style” (95).

The opening passage is analyzed paragraph by paragraph. The first is a lyrical outburst of alliteration and metaphor without finite verbs. The second presents a tender, structurally parallel litany of the girl’s variant names—Lo, Lola, Dolly, Dolores—that also signals her youth. The third, more conversational paragraph raises narrative questions about a “precursor” and alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” (1849), which Humbert distorts to justify his fixation as rooted in a lost adolescent love. The fourth invokes a courtroom setting. The term “intertextuality”—one text gesturing toward another—is introduced to describe this allusive technique.

The chapter concludes by tracing “fancy prose” to its Elizabethan precedent in John Lyly’s Euphues (1578), which gave rise to the term “euphuism.” Lyly’s prose, though clever, wearies modern readers through the mechanical sameness of its patterns and its purely literary register. What distinguishes Nabokov’s ornate style from euphuism is the presence of a recognizably human voice—varied in rhythm and register—animating the formal literary artifice.