[In this review of Bad Characters, Perry finds Stafford's villains enthralling but notes that a "nagging, sometimes boring, similarity surrounds her 'good' characters." ]

Jean Stafford, one of the finest writers publishing today, is a genius at creating "bad" characters.

Consider Persis Galt, a Boston lady living in Heidelberg just before the outbreak of the war, in her middle forties, "rich and ripe like an autumn fruit" with a "stalwart Massachusetts jaw." She is fascinating whether masquerading in tweeds or dressed in low-cut black velvet, an ebony cross on her white bosom, surrounded by sycophantic monks. In spite of the fact that she is a fanatical convert to Catholicism, she regularly violates the sixth commandment with a young Nazi officer named Max. Max is pretty bad, too, since, it turns out, he is a Jew. These two dominate "A Winter's Tale," a beautifully constructed novella and the best piece in this new collection.

Consider Henry Medley, a vastly insensitive leech who descends bag and baggage upon a retired philosophy professor in "A Reasonable Facsimile." He is endlessly articulate, enthusiastic and active but as Miss Stafford puts it, "there was somewhere in him a lack—a lack of quality an imp did not need but a man could not live without." Medley thinks about everything but feels about nothing. Miss Stafford skillfully demonstrates the sapping tedium of his endless monologues. One longs, in vain, for the professor to kill him.

Or consider Uncle Francis and Aunt Jane in "The Liberation." They are self-centered, dreary, niggling, horrid—not beyond belief, because Miss Stafford convinces one that they do indeed exist, but beyond toleration. Yet their niece, Polly Bay, a "good" character, has tolerated them for the 30 years of her life. There is also the ghastly, paranoid Mrs. Placer in "In the Zoo" who tyrannizes everyone around her, especially the two little girls who are her foster children.

No fault can be found with Miss Stafford's talents, but what happens as one reads one story after another is that a nagging, sometimes boring, similarity surrounds her "good" characters. They are all weak, defenseless, longsuffering. They rarely act upon or even interact much with their enemies. They suffer from a paralysis of will, they are vitiated by guilt. Their destinies are solved by external events.

The two little girls in "In the Zoo" do not run away from Mrs. Placer even when they are grown up and have jobs and money. They merely wait for her to die. The philosophy professor does not request, let alone order, Medley out of his house. Medley is finally forced to flee because of his allergy to the professor's cat. Polly Bay finds the strength to separate herself from her aunt and uncle only when her fiance suddenly (and gratuitously) dies.

Every writer must face it: bad characters are always more interesting to create than good ones. The writer cannot help but be stimulated by venom or disapproval or even (unconscious) approval—the bad ones have life, have energy, they act-out. Good ones often seem simply to stand there.

"A Winter's Tale" is more complicated. The story of a young American girl's doomed love affair with a Jewish Nazi, it is haunting and unforgettable. It is narrated as a reminiscence by the girl, Fanny, now a wife and mother, as a kind of expiation of guilt. "I think, My God, Jew or not, he was a Nazi and then I think, what did Nazi mean when I was twenty?"

An interesting condition in the framework of the story is that Fanny is now married to a lawyer who is "ashamed and terrified" when his wife tells him she is staying in her room to "write something." "Writing amongst women embarrasses him. . . . I know that I am safe with my brown studies and my afternoon whiskey—he'll never ask again." One is convinced that Fanny's destiny—this curiously detached marriage relationship—is inevitable.

In another vein altogether, "Cops and Robbers" and "The Captain's Gift" are also unforgettable stories.

Several of these pieces were published in The New Yorker—the copyrights date from 1946. One is tempted to assume that the least successful stories (for this reviewer), "Bad Characters" and "A Reading Problem," are among the earliest written. They in particular, bear all the signs of what has come to be the cliches of New Yorker fiction—the bland, rather folksy accounts of little traumas in a sensitive childhood.

The appearance of any collection by a writer one respects and admires provides two kinds of pleasure: certain favorites are now easy to locate in hard covers on one's shelf and all those ragged and yellowing pages torn from magazines can be tossed out. It should be stressed, however, that any short story is intended to be self-contained. In fairness to an author, no volume like this should be read through from beginning to end. It is recommended that the reader start with "A Winter's Tale." It will take several days to shake off the initial fascination of Persis Galt. After that pick at random. The world is full of little foxes who spoil the vines. Miss Stafford has skinned them expertly.