[In Crossing the Border] Joyce Carol Oates has produced another fine set of tales—witty, wily and variegated. The theme yet again is one of "marriages and infidelities"; the scene that of her home town (Windsor, Ontario) on the United States-Canada Border…. At this political junction (between Windsor and Detroit, Lake Erie and Lake Huron) she plots a series of emotional junctures that also evoke "natural borders". At all such borders travellers, she insists, must confront the abrupt and unexpected challenge of alien "customs".

The stories are linked not only by theme and setting, though, but by the marital rift of an American couple…. The woof of their commonplace marital disaffection, adultery and disillusion, threading in and out of alternate stories, binds and packages the volume….

For her central object of concern is the domestic male within marriage. Can the male of the species survive marriage? Can his...