S.G. Talmor

Most people start writing too late.

They arrive once the decision has been made, once the meaning is clear, once the story already knows what it wants to say. They write after the rupture, after the confession, after the turning point. The text explains. It organizes. It reassures.

Literature, when it matters, almost always begins earlier than that.

This is why I keep coming back to the same books, the same writers. Not because they form a canon, but because they share a rare position: they refuse to arrive on time. They stay on the threshold. They write before.

Take Mrs Bridge, a novel I have already examined in the For Readers section of this blog. Nothing dramatic happens there. No revelation, no collapse, no redemption. Just a woman living a respectable Midwestern life, making small decisions, missing something she cannot quite name. The book never explains her. It never diagnoses her. It never rescues her. It simply stays close to her gestures, her hesitations, her polite incomprehension. The novel does not move toward a climax. It wears away, quietly. That is precisely why it feels true.

Or take A Confederacy of Dunces, another book I have already discussed here. At first glance, it looks like the opposite. Excessive, grotesque, hilarious. And yet, beneath the comedy, something similar is at work. Ignatius J. Reilly does not evolve. He does not learn. He does not “grow.” The novel does not redeem him. It lets him exist in all his impossible density. The book never pretends that intelligence or self-awareness will save anyone. It is a deeply American refusal of moral consolation.

This refusal is also at the heart of Raymond Carver. In stories like Beginners, people talk without knowing what they are saying. Dialogue does not clarify; it delays. Characters circle around experiences they cannot quite name. The story ends not because something is resolved, but because language has reached its limit. A more traditional story would explain what love really is. Carver stops before that temptation.

With Grace Paley, the energy is different, lighter, more talkative, but the ethic is the same. Her characters speak the way people actually speak when nothing has been settled yet. They answer before they know. They explain too late. They adjust their sentences as they go, not to be right, but to keep talking.

In Wants, the situation is almost embarrassingly ordinary. A woman is sitting on the steps of a public library. She sees her ex-husband. They exchange a few words. He is sharp, ironic, faintly cruel. She is reasonable, accommodating, almost excessively fair. Very quickly, an old accusation resurfaces: during their marriage, she never seemed to want anything.

What follows does not look like a defense. It is not a counter-argument. Alone again, still sitting on the library steps, the narrator begins to think about this word — wanting. And what emerges is not desire in the usual sense. Not ambition. Not pleasure. Not freedom. What she lists are modest, almost awkward wants: wanting to be the kind of person who returns library books on time, wanting to be a responsible citizen, wanting to take part in the life of the city, wanting to stop the war, wanting to remain married forever to one person — whether the former husband or the current one.

These wants are contradictory. Some are naïve. Some are clearly impossible. The story does not sort them out. It does not correct them. It does not decide which ones are legitimate and which ones are ridiculous. The narrator herself does not seem sure what to do with them. She only knows that they exist.

The story ends on a gesture so small it almost looks like a joke: she decides to return the two books she has just checked out. This does not solve anything. It does not refute her ex-husband’s accusation. It does not transform her life. It simply proves that, under certain conditions, when something pushes her, she is capable of acting.

That is where Paley’s modernity lies. Not in a message, not in a theory of desire, but in the refusal to turn thought into conclusion. The words come first. Understanding does not follow. The story stops before meaning hardens. It stays, deliberately, on the threshold.

Once you start paying attention to this, something becomes obvious. These stories could not be written from the future. They could not be told from a place where everything is already known. They need a tense that does not explain, that does not justify, that does not rearrange experience after the fact.

This is why I keep proposing that my students write in the present tense.

Not because it sounds modern, and not because it feels more vivid. But because the present tense does not know yet. The past tense almost always cheats. It rearranges. It explains. It suggests that what happened was inevitable, or at least meaningful in hindsight. The present tense refuses that comfort. It forces the text to move forward without guarantees.

Writing in the present means staying with the character, not above them. It means sharing their ignorance, their delay, their uncertainty. It means refusing to become smarter than the situation.

This modern position did not emerge out of stylistic playfulness. It emerged out of distrust. After the twentieth century, after wars, ideologies, and catastrophic explanations of the world, stories that know too well where they are going begin to feel suspicious. Closure starts to look like a lie. Literature responds by slowing down, by stopping early, by leaving things unresolved.

This is why some brilliant writers remain, for me, partial countermodels. Truman Capote, in A Christmas Memory, creates a perfect emotional arc. The story is beautiful, but sealed. It knows exactly what it wants the reader to feel. Georges Perec, in A Man Asleep, builds a powerful conceptual machine, but the text never hesitates. It demonstrates. It does not wait. Perec can be fascinating, but he belongs to another lineage, one that privileges intelligence over exposure.

I feel much closer to writers who accept not knowing. Franz Kafka never explains the labyrinth. Samuel Beckett pushes hesitation to exhaustion. Patrick Modiano builds investigations that fade instead of concluding, and American readers recognize this rhythm instantly, because it resembles their own tradition of open-ended wandering.

And then there is Stendhal. I do not cite him for theoretical reasons. I cite him because I love him. Because he writes fast, because he mistrusts solemnity, because he allows contradiction. He is not modern in the strict sense, but he anticipates something essential: the refusal to pretend that life is coherent. His plots still move forward, but his intelligence is always one step ahead of moral certainty.

All these books, in very different ways, share a single gesture. They refuse to tell the reader what to think. They refuse to turn experience into lesson. They stop before meaning hardens.

Writing too early is not a weakness. It is a form of respect. Respect for characters, for readers, and for reality itself — which rarely arrives with clear explanations attached.

That is why I return, again and again, to these texts. Not because they offer answers, but because they remind me that literature begins exactly where the answer is not yet ready.