Robert Walshe, 17 April 1986
Three of a Kind by Rachel Ingalls.
Faber, 141 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 571 13606 0Show More Home Truths by Mavis Gallant.
Cape, 330 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 224 02344 6Show More Later the Same Day by Grace Paley.
Virago, 211 pp., £8.95, November 1985, 0 86068 701 5Show More Show More“... I have been asking myself lately why reading collections of short stories should be a slog, and I think I have found the answer. It’s the problem of the rich man with a closet full of new shoes. Rich men, as we all know, do not buy a single pair of shoes at a time; they buy ten different models, and in order to distribute them equally throughout five houses in various parts of the world, their hard-pressed valets find themselves staggering out of the shops with something like fifty pairs, if I have done my sums correctly, and that is where the trials begin ...”