SOURCE: Kaplan, Howard. “In Brief.” Commonweal 107, no. 10 (23 May 1980): 319.

In the following review, Kaplan criticizes Dybek for his use of child narrators, a device which Kaplan states allows Dybek an easy escape from deeper analysis.

You can tell the romantic writer by his choice of characters: he's a sucker for outsiders and underground men. In these eleven Chicago stories Stuart Dybek writes about pushcart peddlers (“The Palatski Man”), an amateur ornithologist holed up in a condemned building (“Blood Soup”), sots, pederasts, paranoid DPs. A tough bunch to get to know well in real life, even for writers. So when Dybek filters their stories through a child's point of view, as he tends to do, the strategy smacks of convenience more than anything else: a child doesn't have to pretend to understand what he sees. Over and over we wind up with the little tyke's sense of wonder and no...