SOURCE: "The Hairball on the Mantlepiece," in The New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1991, p. 7.

Wilcox is an American-born short story writer and novelist whose works include Modern Baptists (1983), North Gladiola (1985), and Miss Undine's Living Room (1987). In the following review, Wilcox generally praises Atwood's Wilderness Tips, but finds some of the prose awkward and over-mannered.

In "Hack Wednesday," one of the most engaging stories in Margaret Atwood's third volume of short fiction, Wilderness Tips, a middle-aged newspaper columnist sizes up men in an unusual way: "She can just look at a face and see in past the surface, to that other—child's—face which is still there. She has seen Eric [her husband] in this way, stocky and freckled and defiant, outraged by schoolyard lapses from honor." This uncanny ability applies just as well to Margaret Atwood herself. Almost every one of the 10 stories in this collection superimposes...