SOURCE: Peck, Dale. “The Devil You Know.” The New Republic (31 December 2001): 38-41.

In the following negative review of The Devil's Larder, Peck traces Crace's literary development and denigrates his short fiction as insipid, one-dimensional, and merely “imitations of stories.”

The difference between curiosity and promiscuity is much the same for writers as it is for lovers. The first is a good thing, the second bad, the line between the two rather blurry. At what point is inquisitiveness revealed to be a wandering eye, an inability to focus or to commit?

Over the past fifteen years, the British novelist Jim Crace has wooed an international audience with six clever tales about a fictitious continent, a Stone Age society, a fruit market, a shipwreck, an adolescent Jesus, and dead people. Yet each new book has had the effect of reducing rather than enlarging his oeuvre. Awards have been given, comparisons...