Best laid schemes — Inside the Classic

The Architecture of Misdirection

Nicholson structures his stories around small, plausible errors that snowball. In 'The Susiness of Susan,' the protagonist's offhand remark about Harvard—'all universities looked alike to her'—capsizes a romance she had not intended to end. The narrator notes that she 'had really been no more interested in Harvard than in the academic centers of Wyoming or Oklahoma,' a detail that underscores the triviality of the catalyst. Similarly, in 'Arabella's House Party,' the novelist Laurance Farrington receives an unsigned note delivered by private messenger, its anonymity and the 'taste and quality' of the paper creating a puzzle that drives the plot. Nicholson often withholds key information until late in the story, letting readers share the characters' incomplete understanding.

Dialogue as a Tool of Character

The conversations in these stories reveal social hierarchies and unspoken tensions. In 'The Campbells are Coming,' a magnate named Campbell speaks in a distinctive pattern of chuckles and short, approving phrases: 'Knows a chance when he sees it,' 'That boy knows more than the law.' His interlocutor, Ward, responds with diffident praise of his son. The exchange is polite but freighted with professional calculation—Campbell is sizing up a young man for a New York firm. Nicholson uses indirect dialogue to suggest what is not said: when Campbell says 'I like youngsters of that type,' the reader senses he is also evaluating Ward's loyalty. The author's ear for the rhythms of masculine confidence and deference gives these scenes a documentary quality.

Setting as a Mirror of Ambition

Nicholson anchors his characters in carefully described environments that reflect their social standing and aspirations. Farrington's Berkshire home—'an old farmhouse' remodeled to include a riding horse, a touring car, a runabout, and an Airedale kennel—is presented as the visible reward of literary success. The narrator notes that the house 'had been much described in newspapers and literary journals as the ideal home for a bachelor author.' Yet Farrington, despite his prosperity, is struggling to write. The contrast between his enviable possessions and his creative block hints at the story's theme of hidden dissatisfaction. Other settings—the Sorona Tea House, the yacht White Gull feeling its way up Chesapeake Bay—are chosen for their social specificity, each one a stage for the schemes that will go awry.

The Unreliable Narrator's Touch

Nicholson's third-person narrators are not omniscient; they report events with a knowingness that sometimes borders on ironic. In 'The Susiness of Susan,' the narrator declares that 'plenty of things had happened, but Man had never happened'—a formulation that is both a joke and a confession of limited perspective. The narrator later describes Susan's critical judgment of the sonnet as 'fastidiousness,' a word that carries a hint of authorial judgment. This technique creates a layered reading experience: the reader is invited to see more than the characters do, but the narrator's own biases are occasionally visible. The effect is to make the stories feel less like moral fables and more like wry observations of human folly, where even the teller may be slightly unreliable.

Readers approaching Best laid schemes should expect stories that reward attention to small details—a phrase repeated, a piece of stationery described, a chuckle that signals more than amusement. Nicholson's characters are often clever but not omniscient, and their plans unravel in ways that feel both surprising and inevitable. The collection does not offer grand conclusions about fate or character; instead, it presents a series of finely observed social encounters in which the best-laid schemes, as Burns warned, 'gang aft a-gley.'

Reading Nicholson’s tales of plans gone sideways, I kept thinking how Susan Parker’s quiet year feels like a house with all the lamps on but no one home. It reminded me of the gentler ache in The Crystal Cup — Reading Companion, where the waiting itself becomes the story. That’s the thing about best-laid schemes—sometimes the detour is the truer path, and we only see it later, in memory’s soft light.