Do anything long enough, and you hang up a record. Just go to bed every night, and before you know it you’ve passed Sleeping Beauty. Set down the dog’s dinner, day by day, and pretty soon he’s put away enough Alpo to feed the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving. “Hey,” said a colleague of mine, sticking his head in my office door the other day. “Did you know that you’ve rejected fifteen thousand stories here? I just figured it out. Fifteen thousand, easy.”

Well, thanks. I got out a pencil and did some figuring, and decided that eighteen thousand was probably more like it. I tried to envision that many manuscripts trudging back home again in the rain, and to imagine the reception they got there when they rang the bell—“Oh. You again”—and, wincing, I heard the mumbled apologies and explanations. Then I added on all the other mournful regiments of rejected fiction sent back from this salient, down the years, by fellow-editors of mine in the same line of work: a much larger body of the defeated and the shot-down—a whole bloody Caporetto. “We regret . . . ,” I murmured unhappily to myself. “Thank you for . . .” I sounded like a field marshal.

The regret is real, though it may vary in depth from one manuscript to the next. What is certain is that no one can read fiction for thirty-eight years, or thirty-eight weeks, and go on taking any pleasure in saying no. It works the other way around. You pick up the next manuscript, from a long-term contributor or an absolute stranger (“Prize in Undergraduate Composition; two summers at Pineaway under Guy de Maupassant; stories in Yurt, Springboard, and Yclept; semifinalist in . . .”), and set sail down the page in search of life, or signs of life; your eye is caught and you flip eagerly to the next page and the one after that. Can it be? Mostly, almost always, it is not—or not quite. You read on to the end (well, not always to the end) and then make a note to yourself about what you will say to your old friend who hasn’t sold a story here in two years, or what to put, in some lines scribbled at the end of the printed form, to the young or not so young author who has laid his or her soul out on these eighteen pages but somehow not in a way that makes you want to slow down and enter this particular bar in company with Jay and Hugo and Lynn, or hear more of what was said on the back porch on a particular night of recriminations and fireflies. Sometimes there is a little descriptive passage or some paragraphs of dialogue, or the tone or tinge of a page or two, to single out for praise or encouragement, but even these responses, let it be said, may go into a return letter as much to make yourself feel better, a bit less of a monster, as in any great hopes of getting a socko manuscript from this same author in a month’s time.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about fiction. “How do you get a story published in The New Yorker?” somebody asks. “Send it in, and if we like it we’ll publish it,” I reply, and my interlocutor shoots me a knowing look and says, “No, seriously—”

“Are you looking for the typical New Yorker story?” someone else asks. “Sure, lady,” I want to answer back. “The one that’s exactly like Borges and Brodkey and Edna O’Brien and John O’Hara and Susan Minot and Eudora Welty and Niccolò Tucci and Isaac Singer. That’s the one, except with more Keillor and Nabokov in it. Whenever we find one of those, we snap it right up.”