SOURCE: "Other Voices, Other Runes," in Sewanee Review, Vol. XCII, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. xliii-xliv.

In the following excerpt, Winchell focuses on Bell's role as author of The Washington Square Ensemble.

The novelist starts out as God, creating a world that he knows and controls. In deciding how to use his powers, he makes a metaphysical choice. With the rise of modernism and the more recent emergence of that hybrid known as postmodernism, we have seen the demise of the author-as-God. All notable exceptions conceded, the dominant point of view in twentieth-century fiction has been limited and unreliable. In Ron Loewinsohn's Magnetic Field(s) and Madison Smart Bell's The Washington Square Ensemble we find two current examples of this trend. Both novels use multiple narration to convey the elusiveness of reality, but they ultimately make very different epistemological statements….

In Bell's The Washington Square Ensemble we are far removed...