[In this excerpt, Bawer places Stafford's short fiction in a genre he calls "New Yorker stories. "]

Stafford continued to write short stories well into the mid-Sixties. Indeed, as her novels faded in the reading public's memory, she began to be known primarily for her work in that field, and, in particular, as one of the most celebrated practitioners of the controversial genre known as the New Yorker story. Stafford's short fiction, most of which was assembled in various volumes during the Fifties and Sixties and brought together in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Stories (1969), represents one of the finest moments of the American short story. Witty, luminous, and impeccably crafted, her contributions to the genre are crowded with people named Otis and Meriwether and Fairweather, with troubled children and snobby society women, and with garden-party conversations reported word for word. Extremely long sentences abound, and the vocabulary is unusually rich: a single page of the story "A Modest Proposal" contains the words concupiscently, nares, sybarite, mufti, and cereus. Yet Stafford succeeds in fashioning a lucid, well-upholstered style into which such words fit very gracefully.

To read The Collected Stories is to note the recurrence of certain themes, many of which recall the preoccupations of Stafford's life as well as the plots of her novels. The book abounds in protagonists who are, to some extent, Sonie Marburgs—unsatisfied with their lot and eager to be taken into someone else's world. In "The Bleeding Heart," for instance, "a Mexican girl from the West" named Rose Fabrizio longs to be adopted by a mysterious elderly man who visits the New England library where she works; but her illusions about the man are soon shattered. The most prominent of Stafford's themes, indeed, may well be the shattering of illusions—the illusions of Americans about Europe, of Westerners about the Eastern seaboard, of poor people about the rich, of naïve young people about the beau monde. One story after another seems to derive in some way from the young Stafford's encounter with Lucy Cooke's bohemia, with the Kultur of Heidelberg, or with Robert Lowell's Boston. In "Maggie Meriwether's Rich Experience," a girl from Nashville on her first trip abroad is intimidated into silence by a host of rich and titled folk at a garden party in France; in "The Echo and the Nemesis," Sue Ledbetter, an American student in Heidelberg, feels painfully inferior to the more worldly Ramona Dunn; in "The Healthiest Girl in Town," a girl named Jessie is made to feel déclassé by two well-to-do schoolmates who regard their delicate health as a sign of privilege. (Like Ralph and Molly Fawcett, they're proud of their illness.) Time and again, however, sophistication is revealed to be a mask for vulnerability, for failure, for loneliness, for a history of personal tragedy. And tragedy is certainly plentiful in these stories. Just as Stafford lost her brother immediately prior to the appearance of her first novel, so some of her characters are struck by tragedy on the threshold of their greatest joy. In the deeply haunting story "The Liberation," for instance, Polly Bay—who has been saved from a life of eternal spinsterhood in her aunt and uncle's tomblike Colorado house by a proposal of marriage from a wonderful young Harvard professor—learns just before her would-be triumphal departure that her fiancé has died.

Naturally, some of Stafford's stories are more impressive than others. Aside from the ones I have named, Stafford's strongest stories include "A Country Love Story," "The Interior Castle," and "An Influx of Poets." But even her weakest stories are a joy to read, if only because their prose is so lovely. The deficiencies that they do manifest are, for the most part, those which are notoriously characteristic of New Yorker short stories in general. For instance, like many a fiction writer associated with that illustrious magazine, Stafford places a good deal less emphasis on plot than on character. This is, to be sure, not always a weakness, but it is hard to read the Collected Stories in sequence without eventually becoming irritated by their mostly ambiguous, well-nigh pretentious endings; one has the feeling that the author doesn't want to push too far, doesn't want to face the difficult choices attendant upon reaching the conclusion of a story, doesn't want to risk sentimentality or conventionality or melodrama. The contrast with the emphatic sense of closure achieved in The Mountain Lion and The Catherine Wheel is striking; and the result is too often a denouement that feels dry to the point of heartlessness and pat to the point of meaninglessness. Another New Yorkerish problem is that the stories tend to be cluttered up with gratuitous details—inventories of clothes, furnishings, meals, and the like, with a frequent emphasis on the hoity-toity.

A failing more specific to Stafford's stories is that her sarcasm toward a character sometimes overwhelms her sympathy. This is true, for instance, of "A Polite Conversation," in which a recently married young woman is forced to endure a visit to her new home by a rich lady who lives nearby. The only apparent point of the story is to make fun of the lady, who in her fatuity, condescension, and bigotry is rather too easy a target—not to mention a very familiar one, whose like (in male and female form) may be found throughout Stafford's fiction. These stories, then, are not without serious flaws; to compare them to the short fiction of John Cheever—and especially to that of Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor—is to notice, on Stafford's part, a relative want of sympathy and narrowness of range. Cheever's stories are more inventive than hers, Welty's more playful and abundant, Taylor's more thoughtful; Welty's and Taylor's stories, moreover, seem markedly realer than Stafford's, more significant, more profoundly human. Yet the very fact that one is compelled to speak of Stafford in the company of such masters is to acknowledge that her achievement in the genre is of a very high order indeed.