Disjointedness in The Visiting Privilege

Joy Williams’s transition into a late style resembles Alice Munro’s, occurring gradually over her career as the achievement of a perspective envisioned long before, slowly acquired through narrative experimentation and honed possibilities. Her elliptical, disruptive strain is linked to a passion for liminal moments, when consciousness tilts awry, or plants begin to think while inanimate objects somehow magically communicate with us. Enigmas remain enigmatic, even as her descriptions rely heavily on biblical allusions and psychological commonplaces. The sly revelations of earlier stories become in later years deracinating revelations that do not quite add up, as revealed in two drastically different versions of “Another Season” (1966), which is extensively reconfigured in its later version in The Visiting Privilege.

Bewilderment in Dear Life

This assessment of Alice Munro’s career begins by focusing on the way in which she moves increasingly toward a vision of narrative sequence that undercuts expectations for sequence itself. Turning first to “Amundsen” (from her last collection, Dear Life), the chapter explores her growing tendency towards displacement and indeterminacy, relying ever more on a narrative strategy that can begin anywhere in a finished story and read in either direction. Discussion then turns toward earlier stories, which anticipate her ­distinctive late style in achieving a sense of “chaos” and bewilderment that Munro finds essential. Stories are never “finished” for her (explaining so many revisions and republications), and character is never quite known, remaining a mystery, with plots that rarely sum up or resolve themselves into any clearer understanding.

Epilogue

This brief summary reviews the argument for various late styles, none of which exactly fits a pattern. Each among the quartet of short story writers whose work has been assessed in this book (Alice Munro, Andre Dubus, Joy Williams, and Lydia Davis) differs dramatically from an earlier self as well as from the others. And in closing the book with a discussion of Robert Coover’s minimalist “A Sudden Story”—a piece written in what could be termed Coover’s middle period—we realize how even the very shortest of stories has the capacity to summarize an entire centuries-long tradition.

Introduction

This introduction begins with a comprehensive analysis of the short story’s range, encapsulating a brief history of its practice and criticism from Poe onwards. As prelude to chapter analyses of four contemporary writers who have transformed the field, it offers an assessment of two exceptional stories focused on memory, by Richard Ford and Jhumpa Lahiri, before turning to Raymond Carver’s minimalism and issues raised by his stylistic alterations. The conception of “late style,” introduced by Theodor Adorno and revived by Edward Said in 2006, is then brought into question, along with the short story’s treatment as a distinct genre. A conclusion provides an overview of the book’s structure and rationale, outlining the distinctive storytelling qualities of the quartet of writers, as well as definitions of their late styles.

Less Time in Can’t and Won’t

Lydia Davis’s “flash fictions” shift our attention from narrative to verbal craft, evident in her resolute choice of words, syntax, and sentence rhythms. An abbreviated style compels readers to focus on fully stopped moments, an effect that defies narrative progression much as do Joy Williams’s and Alice Munro’s discontinuous stories. Like them as well, the development of a later style is a matter of branching into new directions—in her case, continuing a microscopic fascination with individual words and their resonances, but now shifting toward found objects (Flaubert’s letters), or letters of complaint, or grammatical puzzles: all as “witness” narratives revealing the ways in which the mundane minutiae of life is transformed into art. The borders between fiction and nonfiction become less clear, as Davis presses on the boundaries of what a short story can be.

Trauma in Dancing After Hours

This chapter traces a contrast to Alice Munro not only in Andre Dubus’s narrative strategies but in the abrupt turn he takes toward a late style that differs so remarkably from his earlier stories. He relies far less than before on straightforward narrative sequence, while his profound faith shifts emphasis from ­crises over Catholic doctrine to plots more pervasively split by spiritual awareness and liturgical imagery. Remarkably, he converts religious epiphanies into narrative ones, with a late stress on remaining ever alert to the moment, living fully within it. Contrary to Munro’s defiance of conventional sequence, Dubus highlights narrative flashpoints. The chapter follows a methodology pursued in each of the others, exemplifying distinctive characteristics of a late style. This involves showing its evolution via detailed analysis of stories across his oeuvre, then focusing on the construction of the late “Blessings.”