Why Can't All Writers Be This Good?
A review by Rhian Ellis
There are a handful of writers I read not because of the stories they tell, or for their memorable characters, or for their ability to evoke a time or place, but because I really enjoy being inside their heads. Alice Munro is one of these writers--her characters are vividly real but not especially distinctive, and if you read a lot of her work, they all blur together. Things happen in her stories, but the plots feel secondary to how the narrator interprets them. And to be honest, if I had to choose a time and place to read about, rural 20th century Canada would not spring to mind. But I find Munro's work--almost every word of it--utterly compelling. It's because her stories are about what it's like to be in a particular mind, to have a particular consciousness. Her noticing, her interpreting, is always new and shocking and revelatory, and right and true. Philip Roth is another of these writers. I have no special interest in the urban, post-war, sex-obsessed white male (most of...
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 There was recently an interesting discussion at The Quarterly Conversation about what constitutes good literary criticism. J.C. Hallmann suggests that his fellow critics ought to approach literature not in the way critics do, but in the way writers do, in that writers are "perfectly comfortable...
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 What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life? In my case, there was a fixed sum of experiences... to or from which I could not yet add or subtract, but which I was skilled at coming to grief over, crucially, in broad daylight.
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 No one who is a fan of Lorrie Moore, or of coming-of-age novels rich in wit and specificity, should resist reading A Gate At The Stairs. It contains patented Moore delights: mordant humor in shades of gray to charcoal, a quirky, self-deprecating heroine who notices both too much and not enough...
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