SOURCE: A review of Flying Home and Other Stories, in The New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1997, p. 13.

In the following review, Giddins offers a laudatory assessment of Flying Home and Other Stories.

The one-novel career, while hardly unique to the United States (Europe offers Canetti, Rilke and Lampedusa, among others), has produced a peculiar frisson of suspense in this country in the postwar era. I'm thinking not of writers who died young, like James Agee, or who consummated extended literary callings with one big fictional work, like Katherine Anne Porter, but of those who made an indelible assault on the consciousness of several generations with a prodigiously incisive novel and left us loitering, season after season, in the vain hope of a second strike.

Three cases stand out. Henry Roth published Call It Sleep in the 1930's, but his novel belongs as much to the 60's, when...