SOURCE: Hulbert, Ann. “Welcome the Wimps.” New Republic 189, no. 18 (31 October 1983): 35-8.

In the following review, Hulbert compares About My Table to two other books of fiction about “men ill at ease in a post-feminist age.” Hulbert asserts that Delbanco's stories are poorly plotted and lacking in variety, and that the female characters are mere caricatures, observing that the collection fails to evoke a “moral sympathy” in the reader.

“A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex (1949), the book that helped inspire a flood of literature about the peculiar female predicament: manifestos and monographs, and a stream of novels—“the female sexual picaresque,” one critic called the emerging genre. But to judge by the publishers' lists of the last decade or so, Beauvoir spoke too soon about men. Thanks to...