Undertellers
Walter Nash, 18 February 1988
Along with the hearing-aid and the bifocals and other indices of personal decay goes an elderly fretfulness about staying alert in a world so teasing, so elusive, that even novels, which should plainly edify and console the senior citizen, seem to become more and more equivocal, devious, conspiratorial, riddling. ‘What’s the fellow driving at?’ mutters Tetchy. ‘Why do I need to know all this?’ ‘Why don’t they speak up?’ These are questions upon which might be founded a typology of narrative which would include the overtold and the undertold tale, the story that misleads with a profusion of detail and the one that mysatifies with laconic artfulness.