A counterpoint with which I largely agree. Wood is limited in his ability to speak of the patterns that prevent a work from collapsing into a mere cobbling-together of separate, stylistically distinguished strands. Wood's evaluations---about style, about consciousness, about the ability to render a scene or a character realistically, about, in other words, representation---direct the tyro novelist's attention to precisely those elements of his prose which already cause him a great deal of concern; distract him from the larger question of how to make those elements cohere.