Peter Taylor offers slices of life. But sliced life often has the vapidity of sliced bread. Nutritious and unsensational. When Mr. Taylor evokes a family quarrel or a tragic loneliness or a dismayed nostalgia, he doesn't make a meal of it. This is scrupulous of him, but leaves us without a meal. Moreover his allegiances are the kindly liberal ones which sliced bread might epitomize: nothing poisonous or pernicious, much that is handy, decent, prudent, hygienic, fortifying. But this is not the staff of life, or the Eucharistic marvel, or anything which you could positively cast on the waters….

The best of Mr. Taylor's stories [in The Collected Stories] are those in which his guileless (but skilled) transparency meets people or situations which are opaque, not assimilable, not ones for the decencies. "Two Pilgrims" and "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time" explore such meetings, and their success is directly...