Wilson, Angus - Wilson as a Short-Story Writer
Wilson as a Short-Story Writer
Wilson's satisfaction with "Totentanz"—whose heartless yet zestful extravagance gives it a unique place among his short stories—is a feeling his readers have generally experienced toward his two earliest collections as a whole. They are a most distinguished contribution to the genre, and display such versatility of technique and variation of detail that no story seems merely to repeat another, even though they proceed from a mental world recognizably Wilson's own and thus characterized, like that of any writer, by recurrent patterns and underlying assumptions. The world of Wilson's short stories assumes a close emotional link (whether present or desired) between children and parents, an "apprehension of moral ambiguity in relationships" [The Wild Garden], a sense of the comedy and pathos of human life, and a preference for the near-at-hand of the observer rather than for the remote distances of the visionary.
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