Adams, Alice | James N. Baker (essay date 1979)
James N. Baker (essay date 1979)
SOURCE: "Delicate Balance," in Newsweek, Vol. XCIII, No. 2, January 8, 1979, pp. 61-2.
[In the following review of Beautiful Girl, Baker declares Adams's stories "elegant" and "artfully simple."]
Alice Adams is something of an anachronism.
Instead of trying to dazzle us with verbal acrobatics or hammering away at ugly truths about society in the manner of many of her contemporaries, she writes elegant short stories that recall such past masters of the form as Flannery O'Connor and Katherine Mansfield. Like them, she offers fleeting, melancholy glimpses of ordinary people made extraordinary by her perception.
[The stories in Beautiful Girl] are old-fashioned stories, artfully simple in structure, rich in precise language and consistently moving in their examination of imperfect human relationships.
Adams puts surprising nuances into fairly standard conflicts. In "A...
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