[In the following unfavorable review of The Palace Thief, the anonymous critic asserts that the four novellas in the collection are devoid of “the small flashes of humaneness and helpless knowledge” that make Canin's debut collection, Emperor of the Air, outstanding.]

Canin's return to short fiction [The Palace Thief] should be a cause for welcome—yet isn't, disappointingly.

In four adipose, rhetorical, quite forced long stories, he continues—as in his unfortunate last book, the novel Blue River (1991)—to strive for “wise” adult tonalities. But these rich, deep voices all but neglect the small flashes of humaneness and helpless knowledge that made Canin's debut collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), remarkable—turning him into a writer who builds high, fussy, false ceilings without walls to support them. Upon an unstartling theme—that we repeat as adults what we do as children—each story here plays out a variation. In the baldest, the title piece, a powerful captain of industry still is moved to impress his elderly prep-school teacher with his temerity and moral sleaze. In The Accountant, an old friend's later-life success throws a careful man to the edge of his rectitude. In City of Broken Hearts, a middle-aged father learns something about trust and love from his college-aged son. And in Batorsag and Szerelem, a boy observes in his elder genius brother what seem like signs of schizophrenia but are instead sexual misapprehensions. It's here that the book is most ragged but also most genuine-seeming: the younger boy has available to him an X-raying psychology no grown-up character in Canin ever does (Canin must be the ultimate “kid-brother” writer)—and it's frustrating that this quicksilver perceptiveness is given so little play in the stories, which are bulked-up instead with grown-up characters that are invariably slow, large, and overwide.

The stories thus always seem to be wearing their parent's clothes—an effect that reaches into the prose itself, a simulacrum of Cheeverian and Peter Tayloresque modulation that in Canin's hands is just pomp and circumstance.