Writers and editors at The New Yorker vigorously deny that there is such thing as a New Yorker style. How can a magazine that publishes writers as different as Vladimir Nabokov and Eudora Welty, for example, be accused of having a house style? Such claims are of course disingenuous; everyone knows that there is a New Yorker style—even under the new regime—and everyone can recognize it when they come across it, though it’s necessarily become somewhat broader since the days when Wolcott Gibbs advised the editors to raise the tone of the contributors’ work, cutting out references to “Bohemian life in Greenwich Village and other low surroundings.” The magazine’s current writers may not live by such strictures, but the style, or rather the mood, of the stories holds true. As a character in a Benjamin Cheever novel puts it: “You know those clever pieces of fiction they run where nothing happens, but you feel a little sad about it anyway?”

John Updike, in one of his reviews, expressed it rather more poetically: “A short story, like the flare of a match, brings human faces out of darkness, and reveals depths beyond statistics.” The match-flare metaphor is an apt one for the sort of fiction The New Yorker has traditionally published. It is fiction that within its self-imposed limitations can be enormously evocative and rich; in the hands of its best practitioners it achieves near-perfection. Because The New Yorkerpays its writers so lavishly and gives them unequaled