A Million Windows

A kaleidoscopic meditation on the glories and pitfalls of storytelling.
"The house of fiction," wrote Henry James, "has . . . not one window, but a million." Gerald Murnane takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house's residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? Focusing on the importance of trust and the ever-present risk of betrayal in writing as in life, these nested stories explore the fraught relationships between author and reader, child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane's fiction is woven from images -- the reflections of the setting sun on distant windowpanes, seemingly limitless grasslands, a procession of dark-haired women, a clearing in a forest, the colors indigo and silver-grey, and the mysterious death of a young woman -- which build to an emotional climax that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of its patterning.