SOURCE: Merkin, Daphne. “The Aura of Suicide.” New Republic 188 (9 May 1983): 36-7.

In the following review, Merkin asserts that the stories comprising The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake do not live up to their critical reputation.

Suicides are special cases: they demonstrate, beyond recall, the grimmest of convictions about life; we walk on tiptoe around them. Writers who kill themselves, it seems to me, are doubly silencing. The act casts so long a shadow across the work that to try and speak in terms of talent rather than of pain is to indicate one's own lack of feeling. And perhaps, however indirectly, this is part of the intention. It is certainly evident that literary suicides succeed in doing themselves out of a genuinely critical appreciation; what they get instead is the most uneasy kind of praise. I am thinking especially of younger writers, about whom there is no way...