Style or plot

I just read Sam Lipsyte's short story, The Dungeon Master, from the latest New Yorker. I've never read Lipsyte before, but was immediately reminded of George Saunders. What these two writers (and there are others) have in common is a sense that voice must trump plot. That is, they're betting that we'd rather know someone and hear them talk to us, than be told what they do. That's not to say that nothing happens in these stories, but the internal state of the narrator or the protagonist is fronted, at the expense of all else. It's a kind of Salingerism you might say; you get an ear pipe into the brain. The tangents and visions and musings of the protagonist are the point. Sure something happens, but the direction of the story is subject to the inner journey, or the workings of the mind of an eccentric. At least it's usually an eccentric. But again, I'd contend that if anyone were to have access to the inner workings of any one of us, and then attempted to express it in a medium as convention-laden as a written text, eccentric we all would be. So the story wanders on the whims of a specific consciousness - not to be confused with stream of consciousness - and occasionally the character breaks the surface into the recognizable world of plot and rising action and closure, but otherwise, whether narrated in third or first person, the immanence of an individual mind's function drives the work.

Stories like this have a sense of now. (Have you tried to keep up with your own thoughts?) They are urgent, and always leave the reader a step behind. You're forced to play catch-up, and in this chase you forget the question, what's happening next? and instead wonder, what's this guy thinking? and why's he thinking it? and why do I recognize this craziness?

Read The Dungeon Master and tell me that's not how it works.