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What remains clearly legible throughout is Greenberg's complaint against contemporary society and what one character calls the "weekend-guest view of life." Aunt Bessie bobbing helplessly across her ceiling is a comic parable of the effects of freethinking, except that the author is not laughing. Her stony integrity often redeems these stories from irritating knuckle-rapping. They engage the mind, unsettle it and survive as disputatious reminders of first principles and last things. —Paul Gray