Over the next few days I will likely write four more white guy short story collection reviews and hopefully meaningful contributions to journalism too. This review, as imprecise in form as it is, as are all these reviews, nevertheless exists as a public artifact for the world to see—or ignore. I was thinking about ranking these stories. But besides ‘The Destructors’, ‘When Greek Meets Greek’, ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’, and ‘The End of the Party’ these are nothing superlative in the wider scope of literary short fiction. Those stories, whether funny, devastating, or just well-written, are great but still somewhat ineffectual. The exception to the standard, of either the great or the simply good and unimportant, is ‘The Innocent’, a five page story I truly believe to be one of the best ever pieces of fiction. At least it’s one of my favorite pieces of fiction - of all time. It would be worth reading 400-500 more pages of these mediocre Joyce impersonations just for its five pages of beauty, joy, and aesthetic wonder. Unfortunately, again, for contemporary standards, it’s ugly, in a lot of important ways, and really its attitude towards women is fundamentally indefensible, but still, even with that all being true, it’s unbelievable.