SOURCE: "The Evils of Modernity," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4678, November 27, 1992, p. 17.

In the following review, McCarthy perceives misogynistic, racist, and anti-Semitic themes in the works collected in Morand's Nouvelles complètes.

This new volume [Nouvelles complètes, edited by Michel Collomb] in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade contains Paul Morand's early short stories, from Tendres Stocks (1921) to Flèche d'Orient (1932). Since his stories are better than his novels and his early writing better than his later, the Nouvelles complètes contains Morand's best work. His novels are tedious, because he was convinced that the modern world was dazzling but appalling; his characters do not evolve, their dreams die and we no longer believe in them. Morand's talent resembles a brief, penetrating glance, which isolates a fragment but is simultaneously aware of all that it is omitting.

Tendres Stocks consists not even of stories, but...