AN OVERPRAISED SEASON;

Facile would be the best adjective to apply overall to these ten stories, and only Updike's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth" (recently anthologized in Spinner's Live and Learn, KR, p. 693, J-241) and Doris Lessing's "Flight" escape that designation entirely. Elizabeth Taylor's moody "Red-Letter Day" and James Gould Cozzens' "Total Stranger" both approach the generation gap from the far side, and there are better stories about a girl's fear and repression of sexuality (some of them in Spinner's Feminine Plural, KR, 1972) than Jessamyn West's rather contrived "Crimson Ramblers of the World, Farewell." Nathaniel Benchley's "Father's Day," and Kurt Vonnegut's "The Lie" — a predictable but clever demonstration of the fact that, when the chips are down, the old rich are more snobbish than the parvenus — are both entertaining, but only Joan Merrill Gerber's "How Love Came to Grandmother," Elizabeth Enright's "The Playground," and possibly, Bates' "The Small Portion" struck us as having more to do with the problems of growing up than the tristesse of aging. Individual readers might find something to latch onto here; to expect more than that would be overpraise indeed.