Response to "1-900" by Richard Bausch

This is a short story I would recommend to pretty much anyone. I certainly handed the book off to my room mate right after reading it. I watched her reading it as I mentally chewed it over, and I could imagine what parts she got to when she laughed ("I murdered my grandmother and put her in the freezer, this morning." "Serves her right." "What?" "I said it serves her right." "You are listening." "I'm trying to.") or scoffed. I could most definitely feel the sentiment when she sat back from her hunched position over the book in her lap and sighed from deep in her belly when she was done.

The characters of John the Caller and Marilyn/Sharon the Phone Sex Worker are very easy to distinguish from one another, and from characters from any other story you might read. They are very much themselves; John is in his early thirties and Sharon is putting herself through college, without telling her mother how. These little details that the two of them talk about, John's questions about Sharon's life, Sharon's reluctance to go into any detail about herself - these carry this story and give it depth. This is crucial, seeing as there is no setting within the story - two people are on a telephone, having a rather unorthodox conversation.

The structure of 1-900 is actually very interesting. While typing the dialogue above, I had to change the very structure of the story. Not because I didn't start a new paragraph with each speaker, but because I used quotation marks. Though the entire story is dialogue, there is no dialogue punctuation except for the [...] used to signify silence. How is this significant? Dialogue without quotation marks is perceived to be more direct - there is no middle person (narrator) telling the reader what's being said. The reader is, in a sense the telephone.