The stories in John Haskell’s Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts—painting, film, dance—in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer—it doesn’t matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell’s narrators are porous—to these other art forms, to the past, to other people and characters. It is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and part of what forms the stories themselves.
