[1] The volume brought Oates "abundant national acclaim",[2] including this assessment from librarian and critic John Alfred Avant: "Quite simply, one of the finest collections of short stories ever written by an American.

[6][7] “Focusing exclusively on the emotional complexity of human relations, Wheel of Love offers a rich—if distressing—view of the mysterious, volatile, and disorienting power of love.”—Biographer Joanne V. Creighton in Joyce Carol Oates (1979).

and "Four Summers," stories which "create a verbal excitement, a sense of language used not for the expression of previously attained insights or perceptions but for new imaginative reality.

Margaret Groppi Rozga states that it represents a further development in her fiction in so far as "the characters are now almost always urban, rather than rural, people and are financially established, rather than threatened with poverty.

But their consciousness gives them more sense of themselves as individuals, separate from but in some ways related to the world around them, and, most important, because they are not so self-absorbed, then, they are not so thoughtless of others, a major change almost unacknowledged in the commentaries on Oates' fiction.