Volume 14, Number 3 · February 12, 1970
The Unignorable Real
By Christopher Ricks
The Collected Stories
by Peter Taylor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 535 pp., $10.00
Pricksongs & Descants
by Robert Coover
Dutton, 256 pp., $5.95
them
by Joyce Carol Oates
Vanguard, 508 pp., $6.95
The French Lieutenant's Woman
by John Fowles
Little, Brown, 467 pp., $7.95
Fiction can do almost everything with its not being fact, except ignore the matter. None of these four books can risk the supreme self-consciousness of claiming not to be self-conscious at all. At one extreme are Peter Taylor's stories, faithful renderings of small-town infidelities, almost (but only almost) asking to be taken as photographs; and yet the best of the stories, 'There,' is also the one which on its first page comes out with its fictional self-consciousness: 'Nowadays particularly, there seems something unreal about people you have known on a sea voyage. To me, at least, it is nearly always as though I have met some character out of the past or out of a novel.'
Review, 3782 words
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