Sublime

I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O‘Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O’Connor

thanks in large part to the branding of Mayor Mazer. He’s friendly, he’s hip, he knows the best places to buy pottery in Mapletown and how to get that fiddle leaf fig tree to grow in your living room. Sure, he’s mining your data like everyone else, but he’s one of the good guys, right?

At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the Irish troubles, plus the short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He serio