First among equals

摘要

There are short-story writers, and then there are Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike and John Chee-ver. When "Binocular Vision" won the National Book Critics Circle award in 2011, Edith Pearlman was compared with them. Her new collection, "Honeydew", may be more muted in tone, but it retains the 78-year-old author's ferociously individual style, characterised by prose that is bolshie yet nuanced, elegant but not fussy, stylish without being vain. Instead of ranging across the globe, half of the 20 stories in "Honeydew" are set in the fictional American town of Godolphin, described by Ms Pearlman in an interview as "tolerant and inefficient and modest". This is a writer chronicling ineffectual, loving humanity, who, in dealing with dirt, sees the world in a grain of sand. It comes as little surprise, then, to learn that Ms Pearlman rereads that master of characterisation, Charles Dickens, three times a year.