SOURCE: Updike, John. “Talk of a Sad Town.” Atlantic 224 (October 1969): 124-25.

In the following review of The Long-Winded Lady, Updike notes that, despite the limitations of Brennan's short essays from “Talk of the Town,” she captures the eccentricities of both the city and its inhabitants.

The New Yorker's “Talk of the Town” department, a space set aside when Ross founded the magazine as a smart-aleck local, survives as a vacuum maintained in case someone has something to say. When, a dozen years ago, I served on the large team that labored to fill each week this frontal void (a task that White and Thurber had performed with the aid of a few legmen), the problem was to perpetuate a cozy tone about a city that had ceased to seem cozy. We were, we “Talk of the Town” reporters, a sallow crew-cut brigade fresh from Cornell or Harvard...