SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Fidelity and the Urge to Fight.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (7 August 1983): 2, 8.

In the following review, Eder discusses the themes of aging and the struggle of individuals caught between marital fidelity and escapist fantasy in the stories of About My Table.

“We do not die from being ill; we die from being alive,” Montaigne wrote. [In About My Table,] Nicholas Delbanco writes of early middle life, when a certain amount of dying has already been done. Bloom has become sheen. The body's youthfulness is still there, but beginning to harden into its own memorial—it will not be renewed. It is the time when blows become cumulative, sapping resiliency and propagating their bruises.

Delbanco's nine short stories are like nine mourners at the same wake. It is a preliminary wake; there will be others. In each story the protagonist is in his late 30s and...