'I can't imagine anything more quaint than a scatological retelling of some nursery tale, or a fiction about a writer writing the fiction you are reading,' Tobias Wolff confessed in his 1993 introduction to the Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories. Writing fiction about a writer who is writing the fiction we are reading, Wolff would have us understand, is obscene. A writer reaching out from behind the curtain of the page to wave at the crowd undermines the enterprise: the rich illusion of reality is ruined. The writers whom Wolff esteems most - among them Kafka, Hemingway and Chekhov - share 'the ability to breathe into their work distinct living presences beyond their own: imagined Others fashioned from words, who somehow take on flesh and blood and moral nature'.

LRB 5 February 2004 | PDF Download