[Sullivan is an American novelist and critic. In the following negative review of The Breaking Point, he perceives du Maurier's approach to human interactions as shallow and calculated.]

The prose written by Daphne du Maurier is both grammatical and efficient. It is a prose well practiced in story telling, and over the years it has given pleasure to a multitude of readers. But perhaps—at least as exhibited in The Breaking Point—it is a deceptive prose, which conceals in a pleasant, experienced way the essential shallowness of its approach to human entanglements.

The stories which make up this collection may all be accurately summed up by the book's collective title. Each piece deals with a person brought, one way or another, to something like a breaking point; and then this person breaks, one way or the other.

There is a story about a man of business who turns artist and is ironically destroyed, after having plotted other destructions. There is one about a movie star, inept, inadequate, inarticulate, but the idol of millions. The irony of the one story is as obviously underlined as the intended satire of the other.

Several of the pieces are out and out fantasies; and the volume as a whole leans toward the fantastic. One excellent story, "The Blue Lenses," combines fantasy with insight to make a memorable little commentary upon human nature. But in general this is a book marked not by wisdom or insight but by crafty invention.

Invention itself is a great gift for a story teller. But unless it is backed up by a deep concern about people invention can degenerate to mere trickiness. And these stories are generally too tricky to be satisfying as accounts in words of people in action.

They seem, indeed, these polished stories, to rise not out of life or the contemplation of life but out of a careful calculation as to what cooked-up material may next be presented, efficiently and grammatically, to a multitude of readers. Even expert craftsmanship, when it stoops to calculation of this sort, can hardly be praised.