Going back, especially to the place where you were happiest, is usually a mistake, as more than one character discovers during the course of these stories by the American author of the novel Superior Women. The strongest afterimage [in Return Trips] is left by the story "Molly's Dog", in which a "newly retired screen writer" makes a "return trip" to Carmel, where she often stayed with lovers in the past. But this time she is going with her gay friend Sandy, and she realizes beforehand that she is wrong to go: not because the place has changed but because she has. Now, older but little wiser, she finds herself literally dogged by a mongrel which, befriending them on the beach, gallops desperately after the car as they drive off. "But why didn't we go back for the dog?" she can't help crying later—provoking a final argument with Sandy, and the painful surfacing of regrets for a lifetime's missed opportunities.

Alice Adams is a confirmatory rather than a revelatory writer. Summings up, not surprises, are the essence of these brief lives called into account by cutting from present to past and back. Several stories cover a decade or more, and require a fair amount of background detail, making them more like preliminary sketches for novels.

The title story, for instance, starts maybe fifteen years ago with the narrator's first, most intense love affair, doomed by Paul's illness and early death; flashes back further still to her childhood in the South, which she loved despite her mother's unhappiness; shifts briefly to her two marriages; and one ends with the unplanned visit to her childhood home which has evoked all these memories. This is a lot of ground to cover in twenty pages, and Adams is driven to explain almost apologetically through her narrator:

A very wise woman who is considerably older than I am told me that in her view relationships with people to whom we have been very close can continue to change even after the deaths of those people, and for me I think this has been quite true, with my mother, and in quite another way with Paul.

Adams is interested in old age: the accumulation of experience fits her theme, and her elderly characters are also her liveliest. In "Waiting for Stella" a group of old people wait for Stella's husband, who is very late for lunch, a few weeks after her death; always irritatingly over the top in life, now she insistently reminds them of their own mortality through her absence. Elsewhere, Adams's assessment of the "emotional reality of women's lives today", as the blurb would have it, is characterized by a kind of defensive introversion: one character describes herself as a depressive, and anxiety is often the dominant emotion.

After Superior Women, the landscape of Return Trips (Alice Adams's first short story collection to be published here) is disappointingly flat. In the absence of humour, sensitive observation and accurate description are not enough to compensate for a prevailing sameness of tone. Perhaps this is partly a result of the way the book was conceived—short stories written to a theme are liable to turn into a series of exercises, consciously doctored to fit the prescribed boundaries: a trap which this collection doesn't always escape.