In ["Domestic Relations"] Frank O'Connor proves once again his extraordinary mastery of the short-story form. As always, the settings, the characters, the rhythms of the prose, are unmistakably—and delightfully—Irish. Yet, fundamentally, these are not Irish stories. O'Connor is concerned with those critical moments when the course of life is suddenly, often radically, changed, when nothing is ever quite the same again. In such moments as these it is the human condition that is illuminated.

Of the fifteen stories in the book, roughly half are concerned with childhood and youth, several are comic, and all are written with an acute, but always affectionate awareness of human vanity and weakness. The humor is superb….

Yet even when he is most amusing, O'Connor's eye is always focused on that experience which presently will transform the life of his character. The youth in "Daydreams" is a wonderfully comic figure but, by the story's end, his whole pattern of existence has been altered.

The stories in "Domestic Relations" are, I think, rather different in tone from some of O'Connor's earlier writings. There is none of that wild, primitive loneliness which found so immediate a response in the reader's heart. These tales are more controlled; a greater effort is required not so much to understand as to "feel" the importance of what has happened. A boy in school finds that the food parcels he thought were coming from his mother are being sent, out of pity, by the mother of one of his friends. There is nothing wild or primitive in this. Yet, ultimately, this boy's loneliness is both real and deep. It is a tribute to O'Connor's artistry that he can create a sense of scale even in this ordinary, familiar life we know.

In a sense, all this is to be expected. For Frank O'Connor, as both artist and craftsman, stands in the very front rank of modern story-tellers. And, beyond art and craft, what he has given us is an example of how amiably, how decently an understanding man can make his peace with life.