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!
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