SOURCE: "Hey, Wait! Nobody's Perfect!," in The New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1992, p. 14.

In the following mixed review, Berne examines the theme of obsession and how it drives the narrative in the stories of A Handbook for Drowning.

What's both interesting and disappointing about obsessions is that eventually everybody has the same ones: We're afraid of death, hungry for love, anxious for approval, spooked by the past—only the variations differ. So it's no surprise that authors write out of their own obsessions; the surprise is when they transform the banal into something significant, when they present an obsession we instinctively recognize but feel we have never met before.

David Shields' third work of fiction, A Handbook for Drowning, introduces a character driven by familiar obsessions. Walter Jaffe, the hero of this collection of related stories, is also preoccupied with defects—everything from his girlfriend's deformed toe...