[The Fruit Man, the Meat Man & the Manager] shows that [Hood] knows perfectly well where he is and what he is doing. The stories are carefully varied, like a bon voyage fruit basket. "Who's Paying for This Call?" is a stream of consciousness, lower case word portrait of the artist agonizing over his use/misuse of his craft and his public. "Cura Pastoralis", about a young priest who violates his vows, "One Owner, Low Mileage", about a widow left with a large new automobile she doesn't know how to drive, and "The Singapore Hotel", about a bank manager's encounters with the home office's whizz kid, are three samples of a kind of workmanlike, slice-of-life story that J. F. Powers used to be good at. They are the kind of stories that set literature classes on the hunt for subtle epiphanies.

"Dog Explosion" is an actual shaggy dog story...