SOURCE: "Misfits and Outcasts," in Washington Post Book World, April 15, 1990, pp. 7-8.

In the mixed review below, McGrath ponders the themes of abuse and vulnerability in Barking Man, suggesting that "the events that befall Bell's misfits and outcasts lack significant power in either existential or literary terms."

Madison Smartt Bell has been publishing fiction at a very smart clip since 1983—five novels and two collections in a mere seven years. In much of that work he has depicted characters both urban and rural whose lives are marked by poverty, failure, madness and futility.

Most of the stories in Barking Man work the same territory, and one begins to wonder why Bell returns so doggedly to the dirt and dinge of existences scraped to the bone. For his approach to his subject matter lacks the engaged analytic vigor that Orwell brought to the down-and-out, and the only Beckettian impulse...