Stafford, Jean - Howard Mumford Jones (review date 1953)
Howard Mumford Jones (review date 1953)
SOURCE: "Memories of Metaphysics," in Saturday Review, May 9, 1953, p. 19.
[In the following review, Jones finds the stories in Children Are Bored on Sunday masterfully written, but sometimes to a fault ]
Of the extraordinary ability of Jean Stafford as an imaginative writer there can be no doubt, but the quality of that ability is difficult to define. Her new collection of sketches and short stories, Children Are Bored on Sunday, raises the whole problem of the nature of her talent, its strength, and its weakness.
It is, of course, an extraordinarily perceptive talent; it is also a talent having masterly control over language as an instrument. There is no sentence in the volume which does not have its clean, precise line. Difficult ideas are stated with effortless ease, the difficulty of the idea not being a metaphysical difficulty but a difficulty of conveying to the reader...
[The entire page is 652 words long]
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