In the stories of [Elbow Room] the ordinary white reader will at first feel at home. There are some men's magazine tall tales about romantic barroom types—the "bullshitters and goodtimers," like Billy Renfro, the one-eyed car-payment collector—which could have been written by any American with an ear for dialect and a satirical gift….

McPherson's stories, absorbing and sensitive, seem at first glance colorless. The narrator of many is intelligent, analytical, and uncomfortably out of place in the settings of his stories. He thinks himself too good for the "street niggers."… But he also despises Paul, the white husband of a black friend of his, because he can't quite be a "nigger." He despises Professional Blacks, too, describing the current scene as one where "even the great myths floated apart from their rituals. Cynical salesmen hawked them as folklore. And language, mother language, was being whored by...