SOURCE: Maitland, Sara. “Pain Killer.” New Statesman 114, no. 2944 (28 August 1987): 21-2.

In the following review, Maitland derides the plaintive tone and psychological density of the stories in Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags.

Shena Mackay has an uncomfortably accurate and shrewd eye for the details of bourgeois life, and an appropriately shrewd and elegant style to tell us what she has seen. This is a combination that suits the satirist well and in Redhill Rococo, her last novel, she showed how well she could handle satire: hilarity without loss of compassion is a rare and lovely thing.

But it works less well in this collection of stories—because here Mackay is not, I think, trying to be funny, though too many sentences do stretch longingly towards a snappy, witty conclusion. Real pain and madness lurk within almost all these stories: the pain and madness of loneliness, isolation and failure. And...