All the Time in the World

Preface

A NOVEL MAY BEGIN IN YOUR MIND AS AN EVOCATIVE IMAGE, a bit of conversation, a piece of music, an incident you’ve read about in someone’s life, a presiding anger, but in any case as something that proposes a meaningful world. And so the act of writing is in the nature of an exploration. You write to find out what you’re writing. And as you work, the sentences become generative, the book foretold in that image, that fragment of conversation, begins to emerge and itself participates in its composition, telling you what it is and how it must be realized.

A story, by contrast, usually comes to you as a situation, with the characters and setting irrevocably attached to it. Stories are assertive, they are self-announcing, their voice and circumstances decided and immutable. It is not a matter of finding your way to them; they’ve arrived unbidden, and more or less whole, with a demand that you put everything else aside and write them down before they fade as dreams fade.

Each form of fiction comes with its own satisfactions — in the case of the story, the heft of the sentences when there are so few, the quick return of an aesthetic investment.

As I’ve assembled the stories for this volume, I see that there is no Winesburg here to be mined for its humanity. These are wide-ranging pieces, they are set all over America from New York City to suburbia, to the South and Midwest and far West. One takes place in Europe and one in no place that can finally be recognized. I am not sure that stories collected in a volume have to have a common mark, or tracer, to relate them to one another. But if these pieces are not unified by their geography and if they move about in time as they do from the late nineteenth century to a moment in the future, and if they are voiced as testimonies, or are given to authorial omniscience, or more deviously sounded in what is known as the indirect free style, what may unify them is the thematic segregation of their protagonists. The scale of a story causes it to home in on people who, for one reason or another, are distinct from their surroundings — people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world.

These stories have been written over the course of many years. I find each of them having its own particular light, though I don’t expect that light to be visible to the reader. I may only be projecting my state of mind at the time of their composition or attributing to them the light of wherever I happened to be when I set them down. But I have banded the stories in packets of similar mental light — a principle of order no more arbitrary than any other.

E. L. Doctorow

November 2010