"Instead of assuming the organic, musical form of real life, they feel like self-conscious, overworked tales, relying on awkwardly withheld secrets and O'Henryesque twists to create narrative suspense."

Why am I not surprised? After Jonathan Franzen's glowing review of Alice Munro's Runaway in the New York Times it was of course just a matter of time before Michiko Kakutani came along to pronounce the entire collection a failure.