SOURCE: "Findley's Fine Line Between Untidy Life and Orderly Art," in Quill & Quire, Vol. 54, No. 11, November, 1988, p. 17.

In the following primarily positive review of Stones, Garebian assesses several stories in the collection.

Timothy Findley's latest collection of short stories [Stones] can be defined by many elements: a theatricality in imagery and characterization, an evocative sense of Toronto (particularly Rosedale and Queen Street West), a compassion for emotional desperadoes, and an urge for retrospective regeneration—a looking back into the details of a past, a gliding in and out of specific moments in a character's life, a dispersing of details within a compass of shifting moods, varieties of human nature, and the inevitability of story-line.

There are two complementary pairs of stories in Stones. In "The Name's the Same" and "Real Life Writes Real Bad," there are characters we have already met in Dinner Along the Amazon, Findley's first...