I did not find [the stories in The Love Parlour] as disturbing as they were probably intended to be; partly because their avantgardism … keeps them at a remove from immediacy, partly because of a certain slackness and attenuation, almost a languorous quality, in construction, particularly in the last group, "For Love of Madeline," "For Love of Eleanor," and "For Love of Gomez." The trickiest of the stories, however, "Memories of a Cross-Country Man," is a real tour de force whose savage apophthegms, expressed in an amusing and convincing Mexican English, memorably convey the bleak notion of this story, and that of most of the others, that "man is illness personified."… (p. 114)

Michael Taylor, "Old Soldiers Never Die: Some Canadian Short Stories" (copyright by Michael Taylor; reprinted by permission of the author), in The Fiddlehead, No. 120, Winter, 1979, pp. 111-15.∗