The characters who populate [Secrets and Surprises] came of age during the 1960's. They are, on the whole, a nice-looking bunch of people who have never suffered from any of the basic wants. Most of them, for reasons often unexplained, share a mistrust of passion and conversation. If a man and woman get together, it is because of a shared car or animal, or because each has a famous parent, or maybe simply because one of them has run out of other people to live with; and, even when they live together, they speak in cool little ironies or deadpan non sequiturs. They live in student apartments in Boston or New Haven, or young-married or young-career quarters in Philadelphia or Manhattan, or sometimes a group of them share a house in Vermont; but they exist mainly in a stateless realm of indecision and—all too often—rather smug despair….
Frequently, in these stories, things are substitutes for the chancier commitment to people; things people buy or live with or give one another are asked to bear the responsibility of objective correlatives, but too often they become a mere catalogue of trends. The reader is left holding an armful of objects and wondering what emotional responses they were meant to connect him with.
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