Esther Stories

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These engrossing stories are too pure and subtle to be called a proof and demonstration of the power of literary realism. Such a statement would have to be translated into suppler language in order to sound as true as it is in fact — into words that could respect how naturally the stories are told, how quiet they are, how innocent of pretense and full of implication.

Realism has been so predominant a style among American writers for so many generations that it is easy to forget it is a style, and a sharp departure from the courtliness and conventionalism that had prevailed in earlier centuries. Its lineage is clearly traceable to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, when writers awakened to the poetry of common speech and the revelations of ordinary daylight. Over the years it has sometimes taken on a moralizing tone, often in association with sensationalism, that famous elixir of flagging invention. But in itself it is both impetus and method for exploration of the astounding world of human experience, the impetus being that the subject is inexhaustible, and the method being the resource of insight and intuition any writer can bring to it. Nothing prevents realism from being called a metaphysics of consciousness except an honorable realist dread of entrapment in categories and abstractions on one hand, and, on the other, a superficial familiarity that masks its most interesting effects.

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