Dav;c~
you may miss some things as you read those twenty pages or that chapter, but still the through-line is moving along for you. A story-a good swry-demands your full attention for those twenty pages, may even demand as much attention as a hundred pages of a novel. It's a kind of immersion that doesn't quite serve that oh-I-can-just-dip-inand-oue-ofit attitude, which is why it's not the same as the novel experience, where you've got a big novel going over a week or two and you're just dipping into it for an hour here or an hour there. You don't have to be at a tremendous pitch of focus for every hour you're reading that novel, whereas the only hour you're reading a swry, you have to be at that pitch.
BC: You definitely practice what you preach when it comes to developing many voices. Your stories showcase a disparate crew of characters. But you also experiment with style. A new story in Harper's this year called "The Criminal Mastermind Is Confined" is a radical departure from some of your previous work. It's more in line with what you have called the "fantastic path" that leads back to writers like Donald Barthelme. Do you see this story as a trend for your future fiction or just something you wanted to try? PHD: It's a mini-trend, but it may already be over. It's hard to tell. Therc arc two pieces. One is the piece that was in HartJCr's called "The Criminal Mastermind is Confined," and perhaps not surprisingly its companion piece is called "The Name of the Great Detective." They're sort of bookended pieces. They were written very closely together-not quite conceived as a pair, but one naturally led to the other. I don't foresee many more stories in this vein; those two seem to buttress each other very nicely. There are a few more playful ideas 1 have that might serve in the space of short-shorts, but they're not high priorities at the moment. In a way, I suspect "The Criminal Mastermind" in particular represents a jailbreak from the novel I've been writing, which is largely traditional and realistic. But also, given that the novel is about, in part, prisoners of war, there are probably some thematic linkages between the two pieces. The other part of my answer is that, you're right, in the very broadest terms there are these two strands in short fiction-as others have noted. One is fantastic, from Kafka, Borges, Barthelme. The other is the more realistic, some would say "Chekhovian," vein. You can almost go right back to Gogol, who I think of as the father of the modern short story. I think about "The Overcoat" and "The Nose." "The Overcoat"-despite its ghost-storyish aspect at the end-feels, in its grinding poverty, like a realistic story. On the other extreme, "The 78
ruGUE #27