Volume 1, Number 4 · October 17, 1963
Needles & Pins
By Eve Auchincloss
A Man and Two Women
by Doris Lessing
Simon and Schuster, Inc., 320 pp., $5.00
The Reservoir and Snowman Snowman
by Janet Frame
George Braziller, 182 each pp., $7.00
The Quiet Enemy
by Cecil Dawkins
Atheneum, 224 pp., $4.50
Are short stories the embryos of unwritten novels, or are they things in themselves? The great ones—and the greatest are surely Chekhov's—seem to be saying all that need be said; one does not feel that a skeleton is going around in an overcoat, having forgotten to put on its suit of flesh beforehand; nor, on the other hand, that a lone knee is wandering through the world, foully separated from the parent body. When Chekhov cut off a slice of life, everybody knew where it came from. He wrote about a society, fatigued, disillusioned, and in decline, but still maintaining a deliquescent shape, which provided a widely understood reference system. More than the novel, the short story depended on that system, having so much less scope for creating a new one of its own.
Review, 2087 words
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