And unlike those of his contemporaries Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, Gissing's works rarely achieve a grandeur of vision or emotion and can strike a reader as claustrophobic, even when they are compelling.
To be sure, the narrow confines of Gissing's fictional worlds--often bounded by the dreary walls of a squalid lodging house or the imprisoning barriers formed by economic and familial circumstances--can be partially relieved by the ample space provided by the genre of Gissing's greatest successes: the three-volume novel. In long works such as Thyrza (1887), New Grub Street (1891), and The Odd Women (1893), Gissing moves between city and country, among classes and conditions, and he surveys the thoughts and emotions of many individuals. But in briefer works that freedom is generically limited; for the reader this can mean an intense, disturbing encounter with unpleasant, even if "realistic," characters and predicaments. "Gissing was no Chekhov when it came to the short story," writes one of his biographers, John Halperin. This comment rings true, for Anton Chekhov better understood the necessity and uses of texture and variety in his short fiction; even so, Gissing's tales and sketches are often powerful, even when they appear polemical or clumsy.
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