Only occasionally, and then with a very light touch,
does Anderson try to fill out the social arrangements
of his imaginary town--although the fact that his
stories are set in a mid-American place like Winesburg
does constitute an important formative condition. You
might even say, with only slight overstatement, that
what Anderson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be
described as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for
precise locale and social detail than for a highly
personal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow,
intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book
about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and
women who have lost their psychic bearings and now
hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little
community in which they live. It would be a gross
mistake, though not one likely to occur by now, if we
were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social photograph of
"the typical small town" (whatever that might be.)
Anderson evokes a depressed landscape in which lost
souls wander about; they make their flitting
appearances mostly in the darkness of night, these
stumps and shades of humanity. This vision has its
truth, and at its best it is a terrible if narrow
truth--but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone
of the authorial voice and the mode of composition
forming muted signals of the book's content. Figures
like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are
not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-rounded"
characters such as we can expect in realistic fiction;
they are the shards of life, glimpsed for a moment, the