SOURCE: “Styles and Variations,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, Winter, 1993, pp. 802-13.

In the following excerpt, McGraw comments on trends in prose style in recent fiction and offers positive assessment of Isobars.

Those who live by a highly developed and elaborated style die by that same style. Recent fiction has begun to reassert an interest in style—that is, in storytelling in such a way that the reader is aware of method as well as material—but it's a thin line that separates a style exercised to its full potential from one that is pushed over the edge into parody. (Of this, there are few better examples than late Hemingway.) A writer who is concerned with particular devices and writerly tics spends a lot of time fretting. Is this one simile too many? Is this the parenthetical aside, the footnote, or the interior monologue that will finally...