SOURCE: “Hoffman's Doors Offers Look at Human Nature,” in Farmville Herald, June 4, 1999, p. 8.

In the following review, Van Ness offers a positive assessment of Doors.

“Begin with an individual,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1926, “and before you know it you find you have created a type.” Fitzgerald’s “type,” a determined, upper-class young woman, courageous and attractive and independent, competing at life and love for the highest stakes—her future—, centered all his stories. William Hoffman’s fourth collection of stories, titled Doors, also presents a type, though one not so readily defined—an outsider who is not restricted to a particular class, race, or gender and who not only rejects traditional social values, keeping instead his or her own counsel, but also acts on distinctly personal beliefs. It is this intense individualism that distinguishes these men and women, renders them memorably large, and which in these new stories...