SOURCE: “Heart Troubles,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 358–65.

In the following excerpt, Johnson offers a mixed assessment of A Model World, calling the short story collection an “immensely promising and curiously disappointing book.”

Jane Austen declared that there were only two things worth writing about: love and money. Though one might wonder how Austen's sensibility would have coped with an era of AIDS and Reaganomics, it's clear from the lively gathering of short-story volumes reviewed here that contemporary writers are finding a particularly rich source of narrative possibilities in the conflict between the ageless intensity of passion and some of the bizarre conditions—by turns tragic, heartening, and absurd—of late twentieth-century America. Like the culture itself, current fiction is reflecting with admirable honesty the diversity of human love—there are convincing portrayals of gay, lesbian, and interracial relationships in these volumes—and it's equally...