SOURCE: "Angus Wilson's Guide to Modern England," in The New Republic, Vol. 137, No. 2244, November 25, 1957, pp. 17-18.

In the following excerpt, Millgate finds A Bit Off the Map to be more compassionate than Wilson's earlier story collections. The critic also believes that the book is an insightful guide to the English social structure after World War II.

It is, of course, the characters in Angus Wilson's new book of short stories who are off the map, hopelessly lost in a land of shifting values and changing class-lines—not the author himself. He, indeed, sits squarely in the middle of the contemporary English scene, like a supersensitive radar scanner sweeping the horizon on every side. With one exception, the stories in A Bit Off the Map are set in the post-1945 period, and, with his references to Suez, Elvis Presley and the Angry Young Men, Wilson contrives to seem as...