The stories are mainly sad, even at their most ironic. There are stories about war, about those who just don't fit into society, about the US South, and the dissolution of marriage, of life, its limitations and occasional tender beauty. Above all, the stories are disturbing, as if some part of the reader's own longing, and occasional feelings of emptiness were being opened for inspection, revealed through the daily smiles and superficial routine. When an old man dies, the tension was dissolved from the air like the pop of a faded string. The writing is brutally honest, sincere, and not afraid to look at the ugliness in every situation, from the misplaced red lipstick, to the empty longing under the pseudo sophisticated fa ade in such characters as Philippe Candlebras, Audrey Wheeler, and Sam Quarter.
Innocence is destroyed, the beautiful die, and the phony is revealed.
Even the most perfect mothers seem to have an air of the artificial about them. Despite the linguistic sophistication and power in the writing, there are a few flaws in this collection. Firstly, the stories are too uneven, with pieces of flash fiction, and even a poem, appearing out of place, and distracting the reader from the longer and stronger pieces. The short story is a complex form, forcing the writer to do a lot with language in few words, develop character, plot, drama, tension, and meaning in the space it takes the reader of a novel to just come to terms with the story. The very short pieces such as Proving Mr Perkins, Finding Sad Bird, Foreign Correspondent, a Prisoner's Dilemma, and Basic Flaws, tend to take away attention from the more intense longer stories, interrupting the flow, and diminishing the power of the others in their brief musings.