Not having grown up in this country, I haven't read many American classics; so, every now and then I discover some great writer I should have read a long time ago. One such writer is Sherwood Anderson, whose book, Winesburg, Ohio, I just finished. From the back cover, one (especially one like me) can find out that this book has had a huge influence on Faulkner, Fitzgerald and, generally, on the American short story. It is hard to add up this statement with what these days we are told are the “rules” for writing a short story, since Anderson’s stories don’t obey most of these rules.

To begin with, his stories have a certain shapelessness, as if they were unfinished, or as if they were merely drafts. This impression is enhanced by the way he introduces some of the characters, who have an episodic appearance, and then disappear. Of course, this being a collection of linked stories, the episodic appearance of some of the characters is justified; but I would say that in Anderson’s stories, the accidental and the episodic are part of the ethos itself of his world. I’ve encountered something similar in Gogol: the author would mention and briefly describe a character, who would then never appear again. According to the most basic “rules” of fiction writing, this is a no-no; that is, if you think fiction is written according to rules. But if you are Sherwood Anderson or Gogol you are just creating a world—which, as any creation, is unfinished. It is also part of the essence of modernity to let the reader sense the “artifice” of the story, as if the latter were a sculpture whose clay hasn’t entirely dried, and if you wanted, you could reshape it into a different form. It is a feeling you often have in reading these stories.

But all of the above doesn’t, really, say much about these stories. What makes them so powerful, in the end, is the humanity of the characters, who, in their grotesqueness, are still extremely touching. Anderson is a master at taking “simple people” and at looking at them in a way that, suddenly, makes them very “queer.” It is a world of weird people who are all very normal. Many of the characters are young men and women who long to be loved, but who are too shy to express their feelings—nothing more normal than that. But under Anderson’s pen, these people attain a grotesqueness that is the grotesqueness of life itself: a youth hugging a pillow and whispering love words to it, or walking on Main Street talking to himself and thinking about doing something “big,” and then being humiliated by some other, similarly clumsy youth; or an older man who has “ideas” that he can’t stop sharing with everyone; or an older woman whose life has passed by, and who suddenly metamorphoses into her younger self before dying, and is finally seen by her own son as the young woman he never knew.

The book starts with a “framing story” about an old writer who has written a Book of the Grotesque. The grotesque is, of course, the aesthetic underlying Winseburg, Ohio insofar as the grotesque is a representation of something strange and exaggerated, but which can still trigger one’s empathy.