In this dreamt-up anthology of mine, ‘Jamesie’ is shouldering a lot of weight. It’s the story of a small-town kid, obsessed with baseball, who hero-worships Leftie (“the Local Pitcher Most Likely to Succeed”) only to watch as he throws a crucial game.

I want to tell you why this is a great story, but that\s like listening to a solo on the piccolo while the orchestra’’ butting in, heavy on the brass, screaming AMERICANA!

So I’ll come clean.

First, Powers’s ‘Jamesie’ is standing in for every Ray Bradbury protagonist I couldn’t otherwise squeeze into this letter (and throw in the youthful creations of Kotzwinkle and Toole while you’re at it).

Second (and here I have no excuse, because I’m no longer even talking about short stories) the baseball sequences in ‘Jamesie’ are emblematic of the sports commentary sequences that rise in a delirium-inducing tide over the narrative of Americana, my all-time favourite (Don DeLillo) novel. 

(I am, incidentally, completely ignorant about American sports. I’m almost afraid of learning about them, for fear that suddenly Don DeLillo, Powers and the rest will, at the height of their Shamanic display, suddenly start to make practical sense. Wouldn’t that be a bust? Picture me as Maria Schneider, terminally disenchanted by Marlon Brando’s account of his ordinary midwestern life at the end of Last Tango in Paris…)

Okay, one last try: Only American writers write well about children in a condition of freedom, and Powers is the best of them at describing ordinary human disappointment.

“‘Why don’t you get out of my room and go and be with them! you’re on their side! and uncle Pat drinks near beer!’”

One other thing to like about Powers, before I end. Like Kipling, he operates in a lucid (Christian) moral universe. If any writer here thinks that would be a limitation on their art, may I humbly suggest that they grow up? 

First published in The New Yorker on June 19, 1943, and collected in Prince of Darkness and Other Stories, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y, 1947