The stories in this volume range from about six pages in length to the novella-length "Windy Day at the Reservoir," about fifty-six pages, so that it might be said there are really two different kinds of fiction in the same volume. The short pieces use methods Beattie has been praised and damned for in her earlier fiction (although most critics have noticed a greater warmth and sympathy in the later work). These are a tendency to bring on characters almost without introduction, which one critic, Iyer, has termed the "chaos of first names"; a penchant for using many details to make a point rather than to state it outright; the distortion of narrative sequence in favor of some other controlling principle, a characteristic feature of "Windy Day at the Reservoir" and one that requires the reader to reread several times to see how the details all fit together...