[In the following review of Women in Their Beds, Harshaw praises Berriault's imagination but faults her characters' inaction.]

As an alternative to those trivial compendiums of literary opening passages sold near bookstore cash registers, how about a collection of last lines from Gina Berriault's very short stories, [Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories]. Consider this stand-alone triumph: "He lay facedown under the tree and bit off some grass near the roots, chewing to distract his smile, but it would not give in, and so he lay there the entire day, smiling into the earth." Or: "She heard his breath take over for him and, in that secretive way the sleeper knows nothing about, carry on his life." Ms. Berriault is nothing if not consistent. In these 35 stories, one struggles to find a sentence that is anything less than jewel-box perfect. And the author uses her gift for language to do more than show us the world through her characters' eyes; we are also forced to think about it from their point of view—no small feat for someone who favors third-person narration. These are complex characters, and although many stories run only a few pages Ms. Berriault never falls back on clichés: an aging male librarian, for example, is no shrinking violet; instead, he sports "a Borsalino fedora" and "English boots John Major would covet." Most of Ms. Berriault's characters are caught at moments of divergence: in "Soul and Money," a lapsed Communist confronts God and Mammon in Las Vegas; in "Lives of the Saints," the son of a famous religious artist undertakes his own sort of pilgrimage, visiting his father's works, and discovers that life is more lasting than art. Yet in the smooth flow of Ms. Berriault's writing, few of these people manage to register the emotional pitch needed to transcend their crises. It is not a matter of stoicism; instead, most seem dizzyingly unaware of the option to act on their own behalf. Thus the stories, so exquisite to wend through, leave one a little cold. Like their characters, they seem trapped by the perfection of Ms. Berriault's prose.