[In the following review, Weinman offers tempered criticism of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed.]

The dust-jacket announces this volume of eight short pieces by John Irving as "a perfect introduction to his work". But the unfamiliar reader would do better to start with any of his seven novels than with these six short stories (all separately published between 1972 and 1982, introduced here by a memoir and closed by an essay). It is not that Irving's fiction-writing virtues aren't displayed in the stories: inventive incident, deft characterization and vivid language are all here. Despite these admirable qualities, however, the stories, on the whole, don't work. Over the space of a novel, Irving's loosely structured incidents, narrated with appealing garrulousness, accumulate depth and intensity, and character is deepened bit by bit. This technique doesn't work in short stories, where the demand is for focus and intensity, and it is on such novelistic incidents, with their concomitant bitty characterization, that Irving structures most of these tales.

One, "The Pension Grillparzer," comes verbatim from his most famous novel, The World According to Garp. In the novel, the episode helps to develop character and the sense of how a writer comes to tell stories (Garp is a novelist); out of context, it is a whirl of characters (nine, not counting the bear) and happenings that don't cohere. Still, it is full of fine sensual detail: "The hall rug was thin, the color of a shadow." "Shadow" means not only the shadow of its former self but the illusions, dreams and memories which fill the pension.

The short-story form also highlights Irving's tendency to overwrite, which is less noticeable in the shifts and sprawl of the novel. Like his model, Dickens, he leaves little room for the reader's inference. He will keep telling even after he's shown. The story "Interior Space" opens:

George Ronkers was a young urologist in a university town—a lucrative situation nowadays; the uninformed liberality of both the young and old college community produced a marvel of venereal variety. A urologist had plenty to do.

After "a lucrative situation" and "a marvel of venereal variety," the last sentence is already understood.

A different kind of overwriting is found in "The Pension Grillparzer." Inspecting her bedroom at the pension with an apprehensive eye, the grandmother sees: "The bed had an unsettling ridge at its center, like fur risen on a dog's spine—was almost as if a very slender body lay stretched beneath the bedspread." In this tale of unicycling bears and ghastly dreams, the comparison of the bed's ridge to a dog's risen hackles is cleverly sinister, but Irving adds the dash, and the heavy, plodding qualified second simile which crushes the effect of the first.

The short story's rejection of novelistic implant isn't the only problem. "Almost in Iowa," in which a man's breakdown is told through his relation to his Volvo, aims for effects incompatible with Irving's four-square, realistic strengths. It is as of he had tried to become Donald Barthelme. (Even Barthelme found that difficult.)

There are two good stories in the collection: the very short "Brennbar's Rant," and "Weary Kingdom," about a matron at a girls' college. The latter is the one in which Irving's novelistic talents are best redefined for short fiction. The middle-aged matron, Minna, must face the play of passion and sexuality between the kitchen-help, Angelo, for whom she's felt some matronly concern, and a new employee, Celeste. Irving's descriptions mediate delicately between Minna's repressed sensuality and her half-unconscious attraction to sexy Celeste. It's a sensitively rendered story of sentiment, in which Celeste may be heavenly, but little Minna is never a mere stereotype of the repressed old maid.