Jessi Jezewska Stevens at Bookforum:
AMERICA IS A LAND OF BEGINNINGS, impatient, virginal, suspicious of foreplay. Sales are clinched on first impressions; books judged by covers; presidents, on their first one hundred days. The critic, novelist, and short story writer Lynne Tillman is an author who refreshingly resists our national logic of instant gratification. What might initially seem like a “theatrical” tendency to keep the audience at arm’s length soon gives way, as the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín once observed, to something “kinder and more considerate and oddly vulnerable.” In a Tillman story, everything can come together in the final line, and often does. In a land of beginnings, here is a master of elegant endings, the rare writer who can construct entire plots (or rather, “plots”) from false starts. By design, her stories unfold with the knowledge that she may lose some ticket holders at the intermission—but also with the confidence that those who mutiny will be the poorer for it. As usual, Tillman is correct.
more here.
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