SOURCE: Kaveney, Roz. “Circumventing Loss.” Times Literary Supplement (14 October 1988): 1155.

In the following review, Kaveney compares Bradfield's The Secret Life of Houses to Ethan Canin's short story collection Emperor of the Air, focusing on the setting of both collections in California.

Obsessive sensitivity and sentimentality on the one hand and flash and filigree on the other are qualities much associated with contemporary California. The billing “Californian short story writer” accordingly fosters expectations of a double dose of either or both, accompanied by a sense of dread or déjà vu—neither feeling appropriate in the case of these two young writers. Ethan Canin does write melancholy tales of failed ambition, and Scott Bradfield does make the stuff of song and dance acts from psychopathological case histories; but both also do rather more than that. They are working out their apprenticeship in ways which owe much to tradition yet show...