SOURCE: Furbank, P. N. “The Gravities of Grown-upness.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4090 (21 August 1981): 951.

In the following favorable review, Furbank traces a connection between the stories in Of This Time, Of That Place and Trilling's critical work and identifies growing up as a central theme in the collection.

Lionel Trilling's fictional output was, so far as I know, a very small one: one published novel and a small handful of stories, from which Diana Trilling has now selected just five [in Of This Time, Of That Place]. We need not therefore conclude that he was not “really” a novelist. A couple of his stories, “The Other Margaret” and “Of This Time, Of That Place”, seem to me remarkably fine and likely to live. Nor need we entertain the stock notion of the critic in Trilling stifling the creator. For criticism is the whole theme of his stories. They deal...