Look What He's Doing

Two truant boys, a few shillings, and a walk across Joyce's Dublin toward nothing in particular: that is the whole of An Encounter, until a stranger crosses the field and sits down to talk. John Banville reads the second story of James Joyce's Dubliners as a lesson in how much a writer can do by saying almost nothing. He has a theory about who the man in the field might once have been, a Henry James story that could serve as the book's epigraph, and a claim about the printers who held Dubliners up for years: they fussed over the wrong words, and the six most dangerous ones sailed past them.