[Oates is an American fiction writer and critic who is perhaps best known for her novel Them (1969), which won a National Book Award in 1970. Her fiction is noted for its exhaustive presentation of realistic detail as well as its striking imagination, especially in the evocation of abnormal psychological states. As a critic, Oates has written on a remarkable diversity of authors—from Shakespeare to Herman Melville to Samuel Beckett—and is appreciated for the individuality and erudition that characterize her critical work. In this favorable review, Oates comments on the preoccupation with death that plagues many of Wilson's characters.]

Here are stories from Angus Wilson's The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos, and A Bit Off the Map—masterful, concise, rather macabre tales of postwar England. The collection is aptly named, for most of the characters in this volume are involved in dances of death of one kind or another, consciously or unconsciously celebrating the doom of their civilization.

Wilson is a master of what we now call the Chekhovian short story: beginning with an immediate involvement in the consciousness of a central character, giving us details which, like dabs of color in an impressionist painting, suggest a whole that is never quite seen but is fully sensed. Wilson's people are generally well-educated, middle-class Anglo-Saxons, human enough but at times rather cruel, sterile, played-out.

The earliest stories in the book deal with characters whose sense of themselves is theatrical and whose attempts at living, especially at love, are fraudulent. The hard-drinking, overly sophisticated, shallow Tories of "The Wrong Set" engage in spiritless defamatory remarks about "Reds and Jews," drift through the years immediately following World War II, and feel that "Life was hell anyhow." In "Saturnalia" a New Year's Eve party at a private hotel mixes tenants and staff in a sleazy comedy of pseudoamorous gestures. "Crazy Crowd," a looser, more extravagant story, deals with the relationship between a young woman and her lover, who is brought with her to visit her "crazy" family. Occasionally, when Wilson descends into the human, the colorful, for its own sake, his stories read like Frank O'Connor's, though his unique touch of wit is always present, rather ominously.

These stories, written in the late Forties and Fifties, demonstrate Wilson's increasing awareness of his craft. Though the concern with individuals as actors, acting out rather pathetic, vapid roles, is still uppermost in his imagination, Wilson gradually warms to his characters, giving us an increasing sense of their human dilemma. But even in so familiarly moving a story as "Mother's Sense of Fun," which presents a bachelor-professor's terrible loneliness after his mother's death, Wilson cannot resist a macabre pun. The story concludes: "'My poor boy will be lonely,' she had said. She was dead right."

"Totentanz," which lends the collection its title, brings together various obsessions—the snobbery of these icy Anglo-Saxons, perhaps too well-educated for their own good fortune; the capriciousness of fate (an inheritance that promises much but brings little); the morbid conclusion of an ostentatious reception. Thomas Mann himself would not have imagined so preposterous an illustration of bourgeois decadence as the "Totentanz" costume party, celebrating various aspects of death: a fireplace got up as a crematorium, waiters dressed as skeletons, guests as corpses, hearses to carry them back home. The grotesque deaths of three prized guests follows immediately, perhaps logically.

Violence and death, the attraction toward disintegration and dissolution, the loss of vitality in even the young—these are Wilson's preoccupations. In the fine story "After the Show," published first in 1957, the eerie dissociation of human beings from their feelings, even their feelings about love and death, is explored in terms of theatrical events, with an attempted suicide as a kind of act, an event that fails but fails even more mysteriously to involve true feelings. Wilson's "younger generation" are contemptuous of their elders, anxious to break free into their own adulthood and into power; but a kind of premature paralysis limits them. Their imaginations are as narrow as their parents' after all:

They had discussed it so often, schooled themselves for the task of leadership which would fall to their generation—leadership out of the desert of the television world, out of the even more degrading swamps of espresso-bar rebellion. They had fed themselves on high purposes and self-discipline . . . Now for the first time he was called upon to control a situation . . . and yet the situation seemed to drift by while he stood like a night stroller. . . He was emerging not as the hero leader but as that feeble figure, the homme moyen sensuel—the "hero" type of all the literature that he and his friends most despised. And he saw no way out of it.

And indeed there seems no way out. These decent godless people know all the right words; they are witty, civilized, attractive connoisseurs of what is left of their world; they are perhaps more in control of their lives than they should be if their lives are to be real, and yet they are obviously failures. Their obsession with death points up their essential failure. And when they actually die, their deaths are troublesome rather than tragic.