Most readers, it seems, are willing and able to construct complete narratives from even the tiniest snippets of information, whether in the form of lazily written genre fiction or in the artful dodging of post-realist writers: a dynamic is created between the limited information the writer can supply - literally, just the words on the page - and the knowledge about how life is lived which the reader brings to those words. I'm thinking here of the obfuscation of the Victorians, especially James; of the essays and novels of Joan Didion, which both forbid and implore the reader to bring his own version of the story to the events at hand; of the seemingly bland fare of Raymond Carver's fiction, offered in full awareness that the reader will sit down at table with his own salt and pepper.

LRB 3 July 1997 | PDF Download