Writer's Choice

       Back to the writing desk.

       Rust Hills, the off-and-on fiction editor of Esquire magazine, assembled in 1974 a short-story anthology called Writer's Choice [New York: David McKay, 1974]: one of those collections in which the authors are asked to choose which of their stories is to represent them and briefly to explain their choice. Wise readers understand that such anthologies occur more than once in a writer's career; frequently enough, in fact, that the real ground of his selection may be to recover some not so representative, less often anthologized piece. In this case, however, the choice was straightforward.

       For my first ten years as a publishing writer, I found the short story an uncongenial, constipative genre, and did not work in it. But at about age thirty-five, having written a pair of short novels and a pair of very long ones, I commenced what was to turn out to be a seven-year investigation of alternatives to long printed narratives. The issue was another pair of books: Lost in the Funhouse (1968), a series of fourteen short fictions for print, tape, and live voice; and Chimera (1972), a triptych of novellas. My interest in electronic tape was a passing one, but my conversion to the shorter forms was so complete that I have come to find it almost impossible to read any new fiction whose pages outnumber my years. If I am in fact just now writing another full-fledged novel, it is out of a kind of perversity, so quixotic does that enterprise seem to me at this hour of the world. But Quixote is where we novelists came in.

       The story "Lost in the Funhouse" was written for print, and occurs midway through the series of which it is the title story. I meant it to look backward -- at the narrator Ambrose's earlier youth, at the earlier "Ambrose" stories in the series, and at some classical manners and concerns of the realist-illusionist short story, long may it wave -- and also "forward," to some less conventional narrative manners and concerns as well as to some future, more mythic avatars of the narrator. Finally, I meant it to be accessible, entertaining, perhaps moving, for I have no use for merely formalist tours de force, and the place and time -- tidewater Maryland, World War Twotime -- are pungent in my memory. In short, my choice, like the story itself, is partly sentimental.

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