News — Criticism

s Some endings of works of fiction provoke the reader to look back and see the story in quite a different light. The effect of these “endings that change everything,” as I’m calling them, is to radically enlarge a given story while at the same time resolving it. The ones I’ve read—and these are rare, to my experience—are master endings, deeply innovative, and, indeed, the two writers I’ll focus on, Anton Chekhov and Alice Munro, are prized for just these qualities: mastery and innovation. The protagonist of Chekhov’s “The Darling” is Olenka, a daughter of a retired and sick assessor....