June 8 & 15, 2015 Issue

James Wood, in his great The Nearest Thing to Life, says, “The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief – it is up to us as readers to validate and confirm.” I confess I’m a nonbeliever. For whatever reason – lack of imagination, skepticism, a Heaney-like desire to see things plain (“things founded clean on their own shapes”) – I’m unable to suspend my disbelief. And so, when The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue appears, as it has this week, I gravitate toward what seem to me to be the least fictional pieces. For example, Thomas McGuane’s "Fall River," in this week’s issue, appears to be mostly personal history. It contains a wonderful line that went straight into my personal anthology of great New Yorker sentences:

I also have a deck of playing cards with bathing beauties in arousing costumes to distract me, as well as match rockets, which I light in the basement until I’m rebuked for trying to burn the house down, baseball in North Park, daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street and has been declared out of bounds, and rides with my Uncle Frank in his “foreign” car, a Ford (he calls it foreign because “it is entirely foreign to me”).

That “daring trips to the third floor’s sagging porch, which is about to fall into Brownell Street” is inspired!