SOURCE: A review of Woman in a Lampshade, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LIV, No. 17, September 1, 1986, pp. 1313-14.

In the following negative review of Woman in a Lampshade, Laren faults Jolley's stories as overly sentimental and unconvincing.

Uneven as a novelist, British-born Australian writer Jolley is if anything slightly less impressive in this collection of stories [Woman in a Lampshade] (first published in Australia in 1983). Here, in occasionally vivid portraits of sad/desperate/eccentric lives, pathos too often slips over into mawkishness—while the dollops of quirkiness seem self-conscious and strained.

Psychopathology is heavily treated in three stories: a halfwitted woman, on trial for double-homicide, is defended by her husband—in a long, stagy appeal, complete with flashbacks; "Two Men Running" is an unconvincing study of madness (involving incest and matricide); and, in "The Libation," implausible coincidence leads a woman to the room where her bygone lesbian lover has...