[In the following excerpt from a review of Peace, It's Wonderful, Ferguson comments on the fragmentary quality of the stories and on the progress Saroyan has made as a writer since publishing his earliest fiction.]

The twenty-seven new Saroyans in this seventh book [Peace, It's Wonderful] show the author's growth in discipline and ease in the form (for example, he doesn't have to write that he is a great writer until page 117, an almost final triumph over doubt). Saroyan's form isn't that of the plotted story, where things happen from a beginning through a middle toward an end. Nothing "happens": he jumps full-tilt into the middle and full-tilt out, like a kid hopping a truck. Though he has done much with it, it is not particularly his: it is the artful form of no-form that has served so well for the expression of the last ten, fifteen years, translating an attitude, a thing, a person seen, an incident or mood or wisecrack, into the running terms of fiction. Static in development, its motion is toward a completed effect in feeling. It is halfway between excerpts from a novel—the form which gathers and carries all effects like a river—and the familiar essay, which is an entire effect in itself.

Saroyan's natural, vivid prose style and that exuberant appetite of his ran wild at first, resulting mainly in cocka-doodle-doo. But he has been getting out from under that gradually, developing control of subject and a sterner selection, by trial and error and prolific work. He still can get such a jag on over his own words that he imagines them to have said something ("crazy, absurd, magnificent . . . ridiculous and beautiful fight"); and the life-isdeath-how-vast-I'm-laughing mysticisms still enter here and there to confound reason ("Comedy Is Where You Die and They Don't Bury You Because You Can Still Walk"). But "The Same as Twenty Years Ago" and "The Warm, Quiet Valley of Home" are so bright and complete in their mood as to be almost a new kind of writing; "The Year of Heaven" and "Piano" and the one about the new Jack London stand out too. The fact is that, whatever the proportion of actually good single pieces, there is a reader's continuity in this book—probably because of the world Saroyan makes for himself, lives and works in. It is a cockeyed world, but very close to the common things and people of the countryside; the book somehow makes you feel good about them.