SOURCE: "Playing the Game of 'What If . . .'," in Book World—The Washington Post, May 20, 1984, pp. 3, 13.

Below, Drabelle provides a mixed assessment of the short stories in What I Know So Far.

In his introduction to a recent anthology, Great Esquire Fiction, L. Rust Hills, the magazine's fiction editor, credits his predecessor Gordon Lish with founding the New Fiction. Since Hills doesn't define this category beyond singling out two exemplars reprinted in the anthology—William Kotzwinkle's hilarious "Horse Badorties Goes Out" and T. Coraghessan Boyle's wicked "Heart of a Champion"—let me try my hand. In a time of egregious turmoil (1969-77), these and dozens more stories published under Lish's imprimatur offered rude, gabdrunk, disorienting, fearful alternatives to mainstream magazine fiction.

Many of the New fictions rely heavily on outlandish suppositions, some of these not far removed from the "What If" segments of the original Saturday Night Live...