Whenever Edward P. Jones writes the fiction piece in the New Yorker, I get a little sneaky kind of happiness. His stories in the magazine are usually based in Washington, with real street names and neighborhoods and schools, and to somebody else it's just another town or a setting, but to me it's sliding in under the eyes of New York with its attitude. This Capital City has more than its bureaucrats, Jones is saying, just like your metropolis has more than its corporate power. The equivalence is obvious, but you don't often see the facts taking shape.

My favorite Jones passage from August's double issue:

Terence was at her door that evening, asking a beaming Hamilton Palmer, who had also gone to Howard, how he was doing these warm days and then asking the father if he might talk a bit with his daughter this evening. Terence and Sharon stepped out onto the porch, and he invited her to a movie and a meal on Friday night. She had had two dates before — and one of those had been with a young man who was brother to her cousin's husband. Sharon was not one to keep a diary, but, if she had been, that meeting of a few minutes with Terence would have taken up at least two pages.

A distraction before a leap. You can read the full story here, with a 2004 interview with Jones explaining why he writes about Washington. And if you read the second half of this issue back to front, you arrive next at John Updike's piece on the waning works of authors and get a challenge added to the Jones story. Updike writes:

Publishing his dreams was for Greene a way of reentering a past that had become permeable and as fascinately real as a dream. Remembrance, always an element in the manipulated data of fiction, is often finally fruitful in purer form, when living presences that once crowded and threatened the rebellious imagination have been rendered by the passage of time mistily distant and legally impotent.

There's arguments to be made about memory here, but the idea of living presences vs. rebellious imagination sits internally and stews. If there's a resolution later, the conflict now seems to be more the issue.

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