Vheissu

Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 20. Michael Cunningham could spend the rest of his life publishing bland, dreary novels, and I would still admire him for having written The Hours . It’s a great book. After The Hours , I thought of him primarily as a writer of novels, until earlier this year I chanced upon one of his short stories. It’s called “White Angel.” Today I read another story by him: “Pearls,” published in The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love … (I’ll stop there, to make a long title short. You can find the rest here .) I’ll spend a few minutes on both of these stories today. First off, “White Angel” is available online, here (scanned from the Contemporary Fiction edition). It’s a good story. It didn’t really grab me for some reason, even though the plot was good, the way in which it was pieced together was good, and the language and descriptions were very good. The plot is simple: the narrator (Robert Morrow) has an older brother, ...