The Trouble With Happiness and Other Stories

DWIGHT GARNER, NEW YORK TIMES

"The Trouble With Happiness a collection of stories, and The Faces, a novel...don't greatly extend her reputation; neither quite makes the claims on you that the memoirs do ... It's easy to make these stories sound even bleaker than they are ... Yet as Martin Amis said, 'Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits.' You sense, in these stories about miscarriages, cheating men, dinner parties gone wrong and frightened children, a writer pulling from a deep well, returning to familiar themes out of a deep compulsion, and that compulsion squeezes us too, in a kind of claustrophobic bliss-out, as if we've been inserted into one of Temple Grandin's deep-pressure hug machines. The stories aren't microfiction but, translated by Michael Favala Goldman, they're really short—five or six pages each, somehow an ideal length."