SOURCE: Phillips, Robert. “Missed Opportunities, Endless Possibilities.” Commonweal 110, no. 6 (25 March 1983): 188-89.

In the following excerpt, Phillips claims that the collection Marilee proposes the interesting idea that Spencer might have been Marilee herself if she had stayed in the South.

The road not taken: The theme occasionally gives rise to important art. I allude not to Robert Frost's famous poem (which merely posits the thesis but does not explore it). Rather, I mean works such as Henry James's The Jolly Corner, in which the protagonist—clearly James—returns from London where he has lived for decades to explore the New York house he might have continued to inhabit. At every corner he encounters the ghost of the self he might have become. More recently John Updike's Rabbit trilogy contains a character very much like Updike himself had he never won a scholarship, left Pennsylvania, lived in London, and become...