As a fake-memoir it can stand with anything our own era has produced but since the book is largely unconcerned with the inner life of Al Jennings, it’s considerably more bearable. Perhaps what gives Jennings and his book their bona fides is the nearly open sense of being on the make—contemporary memoirists take note.
[And who, you say, is Al Jennings? Exactly.]
[not sure I entirely understand the conjunction of modernism and psychology, but since M, as far as I can make out, can be applied both to Pound's personae & to stream of consciousness, and Ψ, as far as I can make out, has very little to do with the stuff of introspection [as Barthes says, 'je' ne peux parler de 'moi'], what I take from this is precisely that various texts that have little in common apart from their nextness can look motivated in their nextness if one throws a couple of blankets over them which leave something that came before exposed to the air]
But the Chekhov comparison strikes me a stretch no matter how generous I want to be to O. Henry. Much closer is another formerly famous now generally neglected 19th century short story master, Guy de Maupassant, a writer whom Chekhov has supplanted for us in many ways, and whose reputation advocates are always trying to revive. When they make their case, it’s often cast in the terms of how Maupassant was moving away from his summarizing plots and toward a more modernist, psychological approach. When NYRB books brought out Richard Howard’s translation of Alien Hearts, this was the tenor of the reviews, “Look not at what he was, what made him famous, but where he was headed.”
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