PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewOf these 18 stories, all but one (an odd travelogue called ‘Morocco,’ dating from 1979) were published in the last decade, and their themes and situations hark back to the author’s earliest autobiographical fiction … Here lies both the triumph and the limitation of these stories: the obsessive recollection of detail for its own sake … Best of all, though, is the knowing resignation of the final story, ‘The Full Glass,’ in which the first-person narrator, approaching 80, takes us through the reduced rituals of the old as they both savor and prepare to give up forever even the simplest animal pleasures.
