PositiveThe Arts DeskExistential questions about place and time, with its \'reckless authority\', and about Israel and Jewishness as well what it means to be in a relationship, whether as a woman or as a man, recur in To Be a Man , and these ten stories encompass an excitingly wide range of characters, ages (Krauss is very good on teenage girls), tones – often wryly funny - and settings ... The thrust of the story is not entirely clear and there’s something unsatisfying about its open-endedness. Soraya’s influence on the narrator is peripheral. But it’s the narrator’s own daughter who has something about her that reminds her unsettlingly, half a lifetime later, of Soraya’s dangerous curiosity in her own power, its reach and limit. There are other stories that are not wholly successful.
