SOURCE: "Short-Story Canvas Small for a Large-Scale Brush," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 21, 1989, p. 3.

An American critic and journalist, Eder received the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1987. In the following review, he contends that the stories in If the River Was Whiskey are flawed by Boyle's awkward plotting and maintains that novels provide a better vehicle for Boyle's talents.

The stories in If the River Was Whiskey are for the most part short tales, many of them ironic or satiric, and with a touch of contemporary fable to them.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, who wrote Budding Prospects, a fresh and funny novel about a hippie turned cash-crop farmer, and World's End, an ambitious entwining of historic legend and present-day lives, has prefaced his collection with an epigraph from the late Italo Calvino.

There is, in fact, an occasional suggestion of one of Calvino's tiny myths going off...