SOURCE: A review of May We Borrow Your Husband? in The Commonweal, Vol. LXXXVI, No. 1, August 25, 1967, pp. 527-28.

In the following mixed evaluation, Coffey faults the unevenness and lack of emotional power in May We Borrow Your Husband? but praises five stories for their shrewdness and craftsmanship.

Graham Greene will be raising sixty-three this year, a remarkable old stager altogether and still doing a stint of writing every day and doing it, on the whole, very smartly, as the twelve stories in this collection [May We Borrow Your Husband?] show. Though three of them are skip and four are fill, that leaves five stories as shrewd and funny as any being written today. And five for twelve makes .416, and who else is hitting .400 this year?

The three skip stories are "Beauty," about a rich American woman and her pekingese dog; "The Over-night Bag," about a citizen who carries...