SOURCE: A review of The Cockatoos, in The New Republic, Vol. 172, No. 12, 1975, pp. 23-4.

In the following review, Avant maintains that the short story form “demands immediate rapport between artist and audience; and White, the most austere of modern novelists, isn't an intimate writer.”

White is a master of the novel. At his best he draws us in, but only so far: the vise that grips the reader is carefully distanced, and that distance can provide an oracular power. But the short story is a form that demands immediate rapport between artist and audience; and White, the most austere of modern novelists, isn't an intimate writer. The stories in his early collection The Burnt Ones are either whimsical, with O. Henry twists and lovable Greeks talking in English except for occasional italicized Greek words, or portentous without delivering. The Cockatoos, a new collection of novellas and stories, shows...