SOURCE: A review of Impossible Vacation, in New Statesman & Society, January 29, 1993, p. 47.

In the following review, Young offers a favorable assessment of Impossible Vacation.

Spalding Gray and Scott Bradfield are both writers who are extremely sophisticated about fiction. They know exactly what it is and what it should do, how it should be constructed, written and read. They also seem to have a faint, sad sense that most of it will soon be forgotten, that it is all perhaps a doomed endeavour, yet both continue to believe that people need stories. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," wrote Joan Didion, and Gray's first novel turns on this realisation.

It is difficult not to see Gray's novel as autobiographical. Like the author, the narrator, Brewster North, is a New England Wasp, an actor by profession, whose mother commits suicide and who starts a career in dramatic monologues...