![\"Anthony](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/anthony-varallo.jpg\" "\\"Anthony")
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I was introduced to the stories of Anthony Varallo in 2006, after he’d won the Iowa Short Fiction prize and contributed a guest essay to this site celebrating a favorite Cheever story<\/a>. I was delighted to hear from him recently and to hear about his latest story collection, Think of Me and I’ll Know<\/i><\/a>, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I invited him to write about another story he loved, and he responded with this tribute to the innovative dialogue of V.S Pritchett.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n If I had to pick one short story writer as the most neglected, least read, or simply overlooked, it would probably be V. S. Pritchett. Pritchett is, to my mind, the greatest British short story writer of all time, and his Complete Collected Stories<\/i> was a revelation to me when I first read it years ago, and continues to be a book I go back to time and time again, especially when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking about dialogue. Pritchett was a master of dialogue. <\/p>\n One of Pritchett\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best stories, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Sense of Humor,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d begins with an exchange between the narrator, a traveling salesman checking into a new hotel, and the attractive woman who works at the hotel desk. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how Pritchett conveys their first meeting:<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a stranger here, aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. <\/p>\n I can still remember the charge I felt the first time I read those lines, which start off as a dull exchange of commonplaces between two strangers, until Pritchett, in the second line, has the narrator say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And so are you,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a flirtation that the woman accepts three lines later with her line, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s have a light,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d although Pritchett never says she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s accepted anything. Instead, he has the narrator raise the stakes with his next line, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s I can see you,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d signaling to the reader that the narrator understands the woman has agreed to his advance; he may now advance further.<\/p>\n This exchange not only contains the DNA of the story that is to follow (the two of them begin a relationship); it also showed me a whole new way to write dialogue: you could take significant leaps between one line and the next—the characters didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to have a strict Q&A session—all to intensify the impact of the lines that remained. Only the highlights mattered, not the play by play.<\/p>\n Later in the story, the narrator brings the woman home to meet his parents. In a moment I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve read and re-read again and again, the narrator\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s father, an undertaker, laments the disappointing changes in the undertaker business:<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The whole business has changed so that you wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know it, in my lifetime,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said my father. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Silver fittings have gone clean out. Everyone wants simplicity nowadays. Restraint. Dignity,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d my father said. The first time I read those lines, I wondered if my edition had a printing error: why were the father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lines—’all from a single speaker—occasionally spaced as if they were from multiple speakers, with a new line for each new speech? That was incorrect, wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it? The father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speeches could have just as easily been condensed into a single paragraph, couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never seen another writer stack the lines one after the other, club-sandwich style, as Pritchett had; I still haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seen another writer do that. The result is that the father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lines hit with added force, carrying not only the weight of his speech, but the pauses between those speeches. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know such a thing was permissible or possible.<\/p>\n In the closing lines of the story, the narrator and the woman ride together in a funeral procession, observing the people looking in at them:<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re raising their hats,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. These lines work like a pointillist painting: brightly lit portions of conversation that create an impression of the whole event. I read those lines and was hooked. And then I read the story a second time, a third and a fourth and more, wishing I could write dialogue like that, too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was introduced to the stories of Anthony Varallo in 2006, after he’d won the Iowa Short Fiction prize and contributed a guest essay to this site celebrating a favorite Cheever story. I was delighted to hear from him recently and to hear about his latest story collection, Think of Me and I’ll Know, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[703,704],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3190"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3196,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190\/revisions\/3196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I am,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And so are you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153How do you know that?”
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Obvious,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Way you speak.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s have a light,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s I can see you,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The war,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the wood,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Take ordinary mahogany, just an ordinary piece of mahogany. Or teak,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Take teak. Or walnut.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Not all of them,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I said.
\nShe squeezed my hand and I had to keep her from jumping about like a child on the seat as we went through.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There they go.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Boys always do,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I said.
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153And another.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n