Mr. Sillitoe's idea [in "The Storyteller"] is promising, but his explication is ponderous. For an artist to write about the anguish of being an artist is to risk the reader being embarrassed for him. How avoid a kind of Byronic swagger, the implication that the burden one carries is only slightly lighter than the Cross? Mr. Sillitoe avoids neither.

Furthermore, his prose is as tortured as Cotgrave's life or nonlife, and shamefully careless. Dangling modifers abound …; metaphors and similes tumble over one another; nothing is said plain if it can be said fancy…. (p. 9)

One's feeling on reading "The Storyteller," however, is less exasperation than sadness, sadness because Mr. Sillitoe has never really left the Nottingham of "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning." The device of the storyteller serves only as an armature on which to drape the same old stories about booze-ups and fistfights and the monotonies of...