The Writer's Trade & Other Stories — Nicholas Delbanco

Life is long and art is short in these nine stories about creativity. The writers' problems seem insuperable: his craft isolates and empties him. He exists more as an eye, a voice, or an ear than as a whole, resonant human. Some of Delbanco's writers gain fame early, some cumulatively, but all are trapped in a Beckett-like cosmic nightmare in which the dreamer (read writer ) cannot but must go on. Whether novelist, poet, or scholar, all slip below their aspirations, especially as lovers, husbands, and friends. The stories are neatly--almost transparently--structured, the settings (mostly Eastern, with a few islands to highlight isolation) sharply drawn, the dialog often almost stagily epigrammatic. The characters are distressingly alike in their discontent. Would that at least one had discovered some real joy in life or art.