SOURCE: Lesser, Ellen. “A Quartet of Storytellers.” Women's Review of Books 4, nos. 10-11 (July-August 1987): 24.

In the following excerpt, Lesser assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Home Truths.

Short stories used to be considered the fiction writer's warm-up, an exercise period, a prelude to the real career—which was, of course, writing novels. No longer. Today, in what critics have grown fond of calling the short-story renaissance, it is possible to make and sustain a career exclusively writing short fiction. Even those writers we think of as primarily novelists now seem sooner or later to publish a volume of stories, as if the rigors of the shorter form were not a warm-up but a kind of ultimate test, a series of advanced hurdles. Sure, you can tell a story in 300 pages. But can you do it in fifteen or twenty? Can a writer—with a necessarily limited number of...