Most of the stories in [Domestic Relations] appeared originally in the New Yorker, where they served to confound those who criticize that magazine's fiction as a monolithic agglomeration of memoirs of dull and surly childhoods…. Mr. O'Connor, to be sure, is fond of recalling his own childhood, but he does it with enough verve and enough sense of "story" to make it palatable. In many ways Mr. O'Connor is a natural New Yorker writer. He is urbane and witty and he instinctively avoids those shrill and harsh notes that—well, that wouldn't go in a humorous magazine is probably the most honest way of putting it.

Mr. O'Connor is so urbane, come to think of it, that one is hard put to explain why he is so splendid an artist. One is inclined to be a little suspicious of so much charm. And perhaps Mr. O'Connor does at times let his charm carry him a little further than his other talents would take him. But we cannot justly quarrel with what he chooses to use as a paddle so long as it gets him where he's going. All possible strictures aside, he remains a superlative story-teller.

The reasons for his excellence are most discreetly inconspicuous in his work. His stories are as unassuming and as effortless as across-the-bar or over-the-back-fence gossip. He admits to aiming consciously for this effect—of avoiding the "literary," the line that does not read aloud naturally and conversationally. This effort has resulted in a superbly clean and lean style, with none of the "poetic" passages, sentimental moralizing and melancholy posturing so dear to some Irish writers.

His stories move. When you grab hold of the first sentence you know you're going somewhere. It picks up and starts off with you. O'Connor is truly a writer "hard to put down." This is partly because of the easy simplicity of his style, but largely because Mr. O'Connor magically makes you want to know why it is Shelia Hennessey married a man twenty years older than herself and whether the marriage worked out all right. He is interested in people and in their motives. And although he does not analyze their behavior in any depth, what he does say of them rings true. (p. 101)

[The] capacity of O'Connor's of stepping up the voltage, as it were, of his stories is probably the secret of his surest claim to greatness as a teller of tales. He is not a writer with those "levels of meaning" dear to English departments, but there is more to him than meets the eye. He is, in effect, a searcher out of essences. The story comes first and, though he does not manipulate his characters, he is not afraid of having a point and stating it explicitly…. O'Connor's stories may give the impression of moving along under their own power, and they are certainly never forced, but however light the artist's hand may be it is there, shaping the material into a meaningful whole, and the artist's brain is at work interpreting this meaning. The effect is a triumph of artful simplicity, but artful it is.

Of course Mr. O'Connor has his limitations, as does any writer. He works in the middle ground of "domestic relations," where tragedy and ecstasy never really impinge except perhaps in comic disguise. But this leaves him nothing less than the bulk of life to work with. When Mr. O'Connor's hero doesn't marry the girl of his heart's desire he very sensibly marries someone else, and if he does any pining it is in his spare time. Mr. O'Connor has nothing to say about star-crossed lovers or obsessed madmen or violence of any sort (though compare his early and superb story "In the Train" for a suggestion that he might have this capacity). Yet he manages to say a number of calmly wise things about the human comedy. (p. 102)