Watering My Little Apple Trees

Book excerpt: When two persistent interviewers asked Caldwell if he would define Fiddler, his answer was "Nope." It was his averment that meaning is a function of the story. That's one of the two responses an author can make to requests for meaning. The other is to say what he was trying to do; that, too, is about the story, not of it. It is only the story itself that can give the reader its measure of meaning. This story fails, finally, to be adequate.