When a critic says ‘flawless’

 This is a hunch about a small point of usage: When a critic says that a short story is “flawless,” she is saying she could read it again.

I don’t get the same sense of the word from people who write and talk about poetry and novels. Most poems are short. If one line strikes you as off-key, you can still get through the flawed poem quickly. On the other hand, novels are so long no one really expects perfection. Everyone rereads favorite novels despite their flaws.

Short stories require just enough commitment from a reader for some readers to want “flawless,” at least when it comes to making a list of works they'd reread.