"Chance Meetings" is another of the familiar, loosely tied remembrances that [Saroyan] has done before but, as always, there are new and marvelously alive passages, and his wonderful, unconditioned people…. Years ago Mr. Saroyan postulated that there are two kinds of writers: those who run to meet death, and those who fight to keep it off. It's always been clear which side he's on, and so every person he's met, everything he's done, becomes cause for celebration…. (p. 11)

There is a particular theory about friendship in this book: "Brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled." Mr. Saroyan prefers these brief acquaintanceships, these chance meetings; he sometimes gets upset when the friendship extends past that wholeness; when, for example, the bookseller he's been chatting with for months suddenly realizes that his customer is the Saroyan. What Mr. Saroyan is talking about, I believe, is his own special ability to see a wholeness, a unity, in an episode. It is what makes him a great storyteller. His many short stories in that long list of published work stay with us; though they are each a tiny thing, they are whole and complete.

So I continue reading him, because he is worth reading. Forget the sentimentality that threatens to sink each line, forget the cloying sweetness that occasionally overwhelms; ride past it all, because at base, and solid, there is the story.

In a "chance meeting," he writes, "You have been thrown together accidentally, total strangers, in order to pass along … the essence of your own story and reality. You are not there to acquire more story, to have more material to carry with the rest of the material that still hasn't been really understood, or certainly hasn't been used, and you are there anonymously." Because he is always there in this fashion he does acquire more stories, more material. Because he has the honesty to admit when he doesn't understand the material, he is able to pass it on to us, and to wonder.

For this, and for other strengths, we owe a great deal to Mr. Saroyan. He's never been ranked among the heavy-weights, and yet he lasts, and he keeps writing. He matters. The stories (and the plays, which are extended stories) are the best of it. I wish there were more of those coming from him, and fewer memoirs, in which the stories get subsumed and lose their clarity a little. (pp. 11, 24)

The Saroyan voice is there because he's always been willing to listen and to talk. He never merely transcribes, as so many other prose writers do. That is the reason we have paid attention to him for more than 40 years: because he is discursive. And, curiously, some of those things we find have now come back into style: the wonderment, the fine appreciation of lunacy, the almost mystical acceptance of another person's arcane self. (p. 24)