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Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story
193 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 3, 2023
Simply brilliant. I am a better reader for having read this book.
September 8, 2008
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 utter down-to-earthness. I mean, to me stories are about the artiest of forms going, clearly all about formal concerns, etc. But the people who write about them tackle it them as if they were spice racks. There is almost never any serious acknowledgment of other critics, and very little use of terminology from other critics-- this in spite of the fact, in the notes, that Gerlach has read all these guys. Likewise, he opens the book with an anecdote about how his short stories used to get rejected with little notes from editors that said things like "good up till the ending." What other school of critic would divulge that?
A weird bunch, them short story critics. There's a lot I like in this book, but it also feels so isolated from the mainstream of criticism that I don't know if I can use it-- maybe what he says is said elsewhere in terms people can agree on?
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 utter down-to-earthness. I mean, to me stories are about the artiest of forms going, clearly all about formal concerns, etc. But the people who write about them tackle it them as if they were spice racks. There is almost never any serious acknowledgment of other critics, and very little use of terminology from other critics-- this in spite of the fact, in the notes, that Gerlach has read all these guys. Likewise, he opens the book with an anecdote about how his short stories used to get rejected with little notes from editors that said things like "good up till the ending." What other school of critic would divulge that?
A weird bunch, them short story critics. There's a lot I like in this book, but it also feels so isolated from the mainstream of criticism that I don't know if I can use it-- maybe what he says is said elsewhere in terms people can agree on?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews