One imagines that a nest of little stories like Winesberg, Ohio could make a hypertext -- that is, that one could read them in various sequences and gain something by their re-ordering.
The book makes deft turns towards passion; some events are plenty extreme. But it's written as though it were trivial, from a POV very exclusively outside the character. I find it far more understated than Hemingway. After all, tightlipped machismo is a gesture of emotional extremis, not of detachment.
I wonder about relations between Winesberg, Hem, and Jewett's Pointed Firs. Firs seems structurally similar to Winesberg in that aspects of plot and quest diminish as the narrator-focalizer-protagonist diminish. Some critics discussing Jewett see this as related to gender-specific ideas of what does (or perhaps does not) constitute quest, crisis, identity and so forth.
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I was a little shocked by how dark the stories in Winesburg were. It truly is, as Anderson wanted to call it originally, a book of grotesques.
I agree that the structure of these interwoven stories would lend themselves well to a sort of hypertext arrangement. The setting is a stable element, and some of the characters intersect (especially George Willard, the young newspaper reporter, who seems like the voice of Sherwood Anderson in some ways), but different arrangements could be done.
I think there is a direct pedigree to be charted from Hamlin Garland's Main Travelled Roads... to Anderson's writing... to the stories of Raymond Carver. A seemingly boring small town is often seething with pent up stories waiting to be told.
It's been a few weeks now since I read Anderson's collection, but the ones that stay with me are "Hands" and "The Strength of God". In each of these stories, Anderson asserts that the characters have manufactured truths and that holding too closely to these "truths" warps them. In staying observational and by not trying to bend his observations too strictly to a rigid and centralized plotline, Anderson's collection of tales avoids becoming a grotesque and manufactured piece. The real truth, the unmanufactured truth, is more organic in nature...
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