SOURCE: "William Sansom: Unwroughter," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. VII, No. 1, Spring, 1964, pp. 122-25.

In the following essay, Young is critical of Sansom 's work because of a "failure of an appropriate point of view" in the stories, the author's "overdependence on syntactic qualification," and his "intrusive use of statements of meaning."

Some things go without saying, but fiction is not one of them. William Sansom is a writer much published in the past fifteen years; the thirty-three stories in The Stories of William Sansom span those years in a rough chronological way, with the last story, probably the earliest, making a return to the beginning. The arrangement is chronologically arbitrary, as if the important thing to see was the development of the writer, and finally merely arbitrary, suggesting that perhaps he has not developed at all.

Sansom is not a writer to whom one can...