Mimesis, premise, or dream: these are "the three stances of modern fiction" Robley Wilson and his fellow writer Stephen Minot proposed for understanding the range of work by themselves and others in their Three Stances of Modern Fiction: A Critical Anthology of the Short Story (1972). Both Wilson and Minot placed their own short stories in the second category, in the company of fiction by John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut that critics were just beginning to call "postmodern" in the early 1970s. No such rupture with earlier twentieth-century writing interested Wilson: no radical disruptions of conventional practice seemed pertinent to his work. Instead, he would--with eminent politeness--invite readers to consider a preliminary postulate and then, with their consent, proceed to work out all (and perhaps a little bit more) than this premise implied.

Robley Conant Wilson Jr., who dropped the "Junior" from his name on publications in...