MEDITERRANEAN CRUISE

Three short stories, a little more palpable than the earlier Theft (the 1970 novella) -- perhaps only because they deal with people you might know reaching a wide place in the road (in this case Greece without any of the glaring Ektachrome of the title). ""Early Morning Sightseer"" features a couple of undergraduates, friends -- still friends? -- after their involvement with the same precarious girl who had died in an accident still undetermined in origin. In ""St. George and the Nightclub"" an older man tries to help a non-honeymooning honeymoon couple only to return to the cold reality of an unfeeling wife, however sexually available. The last story deals with the most hopeless cul-de-sac of all as a young man takes this trip with a wife, compulsively writing postcards (""Something to Write Home About""), whose awareness, of who she is and where she is, is arrested at the dateline inscribed on all of them -- that of her marriage. The stories read very easily, easily, with sympathy rather than staying power, and manage to suggest more than they say about failed relationships of one kind or another where avoidance or accommodation or sometimes just hope keep people together if apart.