SOURCE: A review of A Tidewater Morning, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, Summer, 1994, pp. 571-72.

Here, Curran finds in Styron's latest collection an essential optimism that underlies the dark and painful fictionalized memories of the author's boyhood.

"We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable." So begins the closing paragraph in the title story of William Styron's collection Tidewater Morning. Each of these three tales from youth holds in its own fashion to the truth in Styron's closing observation. They evoke Styron's experience of the 1930s at ages ten, thirteen, and twenty (even though "Love Day" carries us up to 1945 and the invasion of Okinawa). As the author looks back on his youth, he informs it with a hindsight the appreciation of which finds what is timeless in uniquely personal moments warmly set in social and personal history. The cumulative effect of the stories is to...