Grau, Shirley Ann 1929–

An American novelist and short story writer, Grau is a regionalist author whose territory is the South. She is noted for her precise characterizations and her ability to convincingly present multiple points of view. (See also CLC, Vol. 4, and Contemporary Authors, 1-4, rev. ed.)

The Wind Shifting West [is a collection of] eighteen stories ranging in setting from an unspecified South to the east coast. The stories are thoroughly professional throughout, completely competent from beginning to end, but slightly disappointing: I sometimes felt that I'd read several of them before under many different professional names and in many magazines.

On the other hand, Miss Grau certainly knows what she's about, she knows how to build a scene, she knows how to move her characters around and how to dispose of them at the proper time. She is at her best, it seems to me, when her angle of vision is that of a girl or a woman, as it is in the very good title story of a wife's casual introduction to adultery with her brother-in-law; or in "The Beach Party," in which a teen-aged girl is introduced to dates and to death; or in what seems to me her best story, "The Way Back," a relatively brief, unpretentious and completely convincing depiction of the end of an affair.

The collection is also highlighted by two effective, low-keyed stories centering around white-black relationships and problems. "Eight O'Clock" depicts a racial disturbance as viewed through the eyes and consciousness of a young black child; "The Other Way" concerns the only black child in a recently-integrated class.

When she tries too hard or strays too far from the usual, I find Miss Grau less convincing. "The Patriarch," reminiscences of an eighty-five-year-old egoist, is entertaining but seems preposterous. "Three," about a college student, her husband, and the ghostly apparition of her first husband who was killed in Vietnam, is a valiant effort that doesn't come off; "The Last Gas Station," surreal and apocalyptic, I found silly and unconvincing; and "That Lovely April," the author's fling at old-fashioned "sothren gothic," generates some early tension and suspense but ends up a bore. (pp. 723-24)

William Peden, in Sewanee Review (reprinted by permission of the editor, © 1974 by The University of the South), Fall, 1974.

[Evidence of Love] is an elaborated study of a father and a son whom [Grau] first introduced in The Patriarch, a short story published several years ago. Spare, and dry to the point of aridity, the narrative portraits emerge in three separate sections related, in turn, by Edward Milton Henley,… his son Stephen,… and Stephen's wife, Lucy….

As the contours of these three destinies take shape, one waits, with mounting impatience and finally in vain, for something in the proceedings to catch fire. Though the idea of the novel is engaging enough—allowing for immediacy and detail in the self-portraits, variety in the incidents and in the settings their reflections recapture—the totality is curiously flat and uninspired. To be sure, the book has its moments; sparks fly especially in Lucy's section, perhaps because the author is most in touch with the rhythms of a female sensibility. It is difficult to say exactly what goes wrong in Evidence of Love. Peopled with characters resurrected from a previous work, the novel is obviously an investigation of lives [Grau] has found compelling. Alas, there is very little here to make us agree that she should have found them so. (p. 28)

Jane Larkin Crain, in Saturday Review (© 1977 by Saturday Review...