Plot as feeling …

… One Last Book From a Virtuoso of the Short Story. (Hat tip, Dave lull.)

… his stories open with comments so blandly informational, so plain and unnoticeable, that they arouse no expectation and appear to promise little. What might come of “On a stretch of pavement between Truman’s Corner and Boswell’s Hotel a man asked a child if she knew where St. Ardo’s was”? What magnetic draw may lurk in “‘Yes?’ Olivia says on the answering system when the doorbell rings in the middle of ‘The Return of the Thin Man’”? Yet such flat and unhurried beginnings are subversions concealing a powerful slyness. Trevor’s stories traffic in plots, fated or willed, and hurtful. They may be coiled in pity, but they are never benign; their pity is unregenerative. Nor do they carry broad social vistas or axes to grind or hidden symbols ….