Adams, Alice - Catherine Petroski (essay date 1989)
Catherine Petroski (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Tales of Broken Love," in Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1989, p. 5.
[In the following review, Petroski appraises the themes and characters of the stories in After You've Gone.]
Alice Adams' new collection of short stories, [After You've Gone], is the work of a writer at the height of her powers—lucid, confident, refined, adept, provocative, perspicacious, startling and satisfying.
Adams is among the most triumphantly feminine, if not militantly feminist, writers working in a form sometimes considered the special preserve of female writers. In years to come, these stories may well be valued for extra-literary reasons, for they record the milieu and concerns of a particular generation of women in a certain social stratum.
To rush Adams' stories to the vault of literary and social history, however, would do a disservice to both author and readers, for thisis fiction...
[The entire page is 791 words long]
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