Response to "1-900" by Richard Bausch

The best thing about this piece is its complete lack of authoritative interference. Nowhere in this piece does Bausch reveal his presence or even commentate on what his characters are doing or saying. John and Sharon constitute the entirety of the content. As any writer knows, constructing an interesting, cohesive story without any dialogue tags, adverbs, or descriptions of characters’ thoughts is insanely difficult. For doing this, and doing it so well, Bausch deserves nothing less than mad props.

            What really helped this piece work was the utilization of pauses. Since the work is based purely on the dialogue between two people, these periodic breaks not only helped vary tempo and convey emphasis, but also created a realistic feeling around the conversation. A vast majority of phone conversations involve pauses or inquiries of “Hello?” to make sure the other person is still on the line. Bausch includes plenty of these pauses and inquiries, as is necessary to make the audience believe two people are really talking on the phone. It was also nice getting to know the characters just by hearing their conversation rather than having their histories explained to us by the author. I will admit that some of the dialogue did not feel very organic, but the idea behind this style of fiction is appealing.

            The overall structure of this work was interesting, but I cannot say I was crazy about it in this case. What Bausch does very clearly is create an over-arching chiasmus of roles: John resists talking dirty in the beginning while Sharon insists upon it, only to have Sharon resist at the end while John insists (somewhat). The interaction between these two is compelling to some degree, but I found myself feeling like this was a story written to fit a preconceived blueprint rather than being a story that just so happened to take on a particular form. When Sharon refuses to service John towards the end, I did not feel like she did it because that’s what her character would actually do; I felt she did it because it would be nice of her to do in order to fit a parallel structure. I would consider myself accomplished if I could write a piece based only on dialogue like this, but I might try to work my characters so they did not appear to have ulterior literary motives.