The East and the Circles

A boy at the railings, a girl he cannot speak to, and a bazaar across the city with the East in its name. John Banville reads Araby, the third story in James Joyce's Dubliners, as a story told almost entirely in glances, and he stops on the single sentence that shows you how it works. Then he widens the view: to Chekhov, of all people, to a city where everybody talks and nobody moves, and to the young Joyce, who got out, though not the way he liked to tell it. Once you have seen your city as a circle, what would it take to walk out of it?