SOURCE: Brandmark, Wendy. “Awful Daring.” New Statesman & Society 7, no. 292 (4 March 1994): 40.

In the following positive review of The Palace Thief, Brandmark maintains that what makes Canin “an exceptional writer rather than just a clever one is his combination of wit, compassion and moral seriousness.”

Ethan Canin writes about men of quiet desperation. Each of these four novellas [in The Palace Thief] reaches its epiphany in the hero's moment of folly or dishonesty, when he realises that the flaw in his character that allowed him this small rebellion is “so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself.”

Canin does not always seem comfortable with the limited scope of the novella. Batorsag and Szerelem is too ambitious a coming-of-age story for such a compressed narrative, but The Accountant and The Palace Thief seem perfectly mated to their form. They are about men who have led...