She believed in her power as a storyteller to create worlds charged with meaning and invite readers into those worlds. She believed she could share her vision through the mediation of language. Though theoretically problematic, that belief still stands as a challenge to today s skeptical critics. It is a belief, I think, with which Andre Dubus would have sympathized. There are many ways to read stories.
Some texts are surely more baffling to penetration, more willfully ambiguous, than others.
Our removal in time and culture from the moment of a story s composition creates a barrier between author and reader that can never be fully overcome the greater the temporal and cultural gap, the larger the difficulties in interpretation. Nevertheless, I believe it possible to apprehend portions of the spirit in which a story has been written. Not all stories lend themselves to such apprehension, but many do. I do not come to this belief through theoretical reasoning, but through my encounters with texts. As I read fiction and teach it I will seek to maintain a certain faith, not only in the precarious reliability of words, but in the notion that authors use words with purpose that readers may, by a combination of wit and grace, divine.