Wiebe is well known as an author whose writing, especially his historical fiction, makes considerable demands on its readers. His novel The Blue Mountains of China (1970), for example, is a deliberately disjointed narrative, employing a variety of narrative techniques, multiple voices, and radical shifts in point of view and time. Wiebe’s stylistic variety and structural inventiveness honor serious readers for the commitment and intelligence they bring to the task.

“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” violates expectations that a reader normally brings to the reading of a short story: a beginning, middle, and end that include setting, character, and plot. Instead, Wiebe’s story begins more like an essay on the problem of story making. There are relevant quotations from philosophers Teilhard de Chardin and Aristotle and from English sociologist Arnold Toynbee. There are names and exhibits and buildings and a scattering of data that initially confuse because no context for them has yet been provided. They are just so many fragments of some event whose nature the reader can only guess, pieces...---enotes.com