Matt's review
Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story by John Gerlach
This is a really solid, if slightly strange, book of criticism.... Gerlach attempts a historical survey of the way endings to American short stories have changed, mostly from the time Poe wrote his famous essay on Hawthorne's _Twice-Told Takes_ onward, and G's idea seems to be that though there is a tendency to have wider and wider forms of endings, endings incomplete and on occasion indirect, they are always preceded by the same sort of what he calls "closural symbols"-- that there is always something in the text that tells us, yes, this is supposed to be the ending.
Of course, it's more interesting than that, and the sense he makes, for example, out of the end of Coover's "The Babysitter" or Updike's "Ace in the Hole" shows him a really careful reader and one who I think is pretty imaginatively invested in the stories he reads. These are all admirable qualities.
Now for the weird part: critics who write about short stories are strange in their utte...more
Of course, it's more interesting than that, and the sense he makes, for example, out of the end of Coover's "The Babysitter" or Updike's "Ace in the Hole" shows him a really careful reader and one who I think is pretty imaginatively invested in the stories he reads. These are all admirable qualities.
Now for the weird part: critics who write about short stories are strange in their utte...more
