[The Camera Always Lies] reminds me of the novels that used to be circulated by the Doubleday Dollar Book Club and the Literary Guild—books that were neither quite good enough nor quite bad enough to make it with Reader's Digest Condensed Books, or the Book of the Month Club.

Mr. Hood is a good, solid, old-fashioned pro, when it comes to putting a short story or a novel together. It seemed to me that his collection of stories, Flying A Red Kite, had an Irish texture. Its strong, formal sentences and paragraphs reminded me of the Irish writers who did their best work between the wars: Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain, for instance. None of the stories was very interesting, but none was phony, either. (p. 46)

The trouble is that Mr. Hood's style is too heavy for this kind of book, the plot of which revolves around...