Acquainted with the Night, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Harper & Row, 226 pp., $13.95)
I’d rather drink whole-blood spritzers than review a short-story collection. This is not automatic writing for me. How do you do it well in eight hundred words? There is the checkoutcounter method, of course: name each story, give 15-word plot wrap-up, grade pass/fail or incomplete. Then again, I could isolate one or two “typical” fictions—which probably aren’t typical at all and would distort the collection. I’ve often used thematic approaches: you know, dig up some air-stream filter of a motif and blow the entire package through it. Pure critical conceit usually: a decent writer (and Miss Schwartz is quite decent) will be too various for one building code. How about the sound-check approach? Analyze diction and voice. But, same trap there, any fiction writer worth his or her rhino should be able to pump fake and change style 16 different ways in 16 different stories. A review of either sort will impute more structure or monotone to the book than it really has. My strainometer, at this point, hits overload. And yet I knew there was something familiar about the whole Schwartz collection.
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