[In this favorable review of Bad Characters, Curley praises Stafford's characterization and narrative technique. ]

I don't intend faint praise by saying that it's always a pleasure to read Jean Stafford but a distinction, since it is a pleasure, and neither instruction nor enthusiasm, that is Miss Stafford's gift. It is, however, somewhat qualified praise to say that it is a long while since I have simply enjoyed a new book so much. (Seven of the ten stories [in Bad Characters] appeared in the New Yorker, but they are all new to me.) Qualified, because Miss Stafford so manages her characters that you always like and dislike the ones she likes and dislikes.

Her intelligence is acute, her heart is in the right place and she writes well: it is rather like going through a museum with somebody who knows the paintings so much better than you that it is impossible not to agree and very difficult not to be persuaded. It seems to me she is better when she stands off from her characters omnisciently than when she adopts the voice, let us say, of Emily Vanderpool. As Miss Stafford says in a note, Emily is not a bad character; her troubles stem from the low company she kept. That's true enough, but I was rather glad that Emily's control of the story was not extended to the length of a novel. With one exception, criticism of these stories is impertinent: nothing need be said because it has all been said well by the author. The exception is "A Winter's Tale," the [novella] . . . at the end of the book. It is a beautiful story, one in which the problem of the narrator has been solved perfectly. The woman who tells the story is thirty seven years old, married and with children. But: " . . . what I address so assiduously is a winter of my youth, irrelevant to all my present situations, a half year so sharply independent of all my later history that I read it like a fiction; or like a dream in which all action is instinctive and none of it has its genesis in a knowledge of right and wrong."

We, too, read it like a fiction and the twenty-year-old Boston Irish girl who goes to Heidelberg during her junior year at Boston College (a young lady at Boston College in the thirties?) has, indeed, little to do with the thirty-seven-year-old mother recalling her youth. Her father, an ascetic Boston Irishman and a widower, accompanies Fanny as far as Paris, where he remains to be scandalized but sends his daughter on to Heidelberg to master German under the watchful eye of Frau Professor Galt, a Boston Yankee convert married to an atheist Scot.

Persis Galt is the bad character of the volume. At first meeting she is the convert to end all converts. Upon retiring to her "chaste cell" to read the noon office, she asks Fanny: "would you like a rosary? Or will you simply meditate?" But she is more than silly, she is wicked, and Fanny's tale brings out her wickedness with a civilized relish that few men would be capable of. Hate sees clearly and Persis Galt deserves this hatred. And yet, and yet: what would Miss Stafford have done if she had attempted to write from within Persis Galt?

As Fanny sees her, she is so purely evil that one suspects one is dealing not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers. Evil, of course, is unknowable as such, since it is a privation which can only be known impurely, as it inheres in good, and that is reason enough for Miss Stafford to choose to stay outside her. What bothers me, however, is that her fastidious aloofness to the human nature of Frau Professor Galt limits Miss Stafford's range in other stories as well. I am thinking less of this present volume than of her future work, for it is not clear how she can get any better unless she is willing to get her hands, and her mind, a little dirty. She might, for instance, cultivate a few sociologists to see if she could bring her prose back pure. Jean Stafford is too good a writer to stand still.