[Peden is an American writer, critic, and educator. In this review of Children Are Bored on Sunday, he finds the stories beautiful, sad, and complex.]

To paraphrase a comment once made by James Branch Cabell, Jean Stafford seems to have dedicated herself to writing beautifully about unbeautiful matters. The smell of the sickroom hovers like an incubus over these sad and unforgettable short stories [in Children Are Bored on Sunday]. Maladies or misfortunes of one sort or other cause Miss Stafford's characters to retreat from the world of customary urges and responses into a never-never land of dreams and unfulfilled desires, a land where sickness is king and despair his consort. Within its boundaries, Miss Stafford writes with certainty, understanding and beauty. Like her three novels, these stories, within their impeccable framework, are meaningful and complex. They remind me of children's Japanese flower-shells which when submerged in water open silently to disgorge a phantasmagoria of paper flowers, richly colored, varied and vaguely grotesque in contrast to the bland, unrevealing walls of their temporary habitations.

Most of Miss Stafford's stories center around an individual who is struggling to maintain his identity and self-respect in the face of some abnormality or accident of fate which alienates him from his fellows. Typical is the obese Ramona of "The Echo and the Nemesis," hag-ridden by an enormous appetite who in dreams sees herself as "nothing but an enormous mouth and a tongue, trembling lasciviously"; she seeks escape by creating the myth of a twin sister, beautiful and soon-dead, who is in reality her own lost beauty before eating became a disease and a madness, a beauty "dead, dead and buried beneath layers and layers of fat."

Similarly, the main character of "A Country Love Story," bedeviled by an unresponsive, sickly husband, suffers for sins she does not commit with a lover who exists only in her imagination. A third, her head and face smashed in an automobile accident, retires in like fashion to the schizoid's dream world, more real than reality, where her reason for being becomes the contemplation of her own brain, "pink and always fragile, always deeply interior and invaluable; . . . She knew that she could never again love anything as ecstatically as she loved the spirit . . . enclosed within her head."

They display their eccentricities like military decorations, these damaged and unhappy characters. One contemplates the world through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars; another covers his wen with a dirty stock, chews Neccos, and walks through doors backward. There is nothing eccentric, however, in Miss Stafford's treatment of character or development of theme. Whether she is writing in the grotesque, masque-like manner of "A Modest Proposal" or the naturalistic method of "A Summer Day," she is always the artist working painstakingly in prose of admirable texture and variety. If her world is a bleakly inhibited one, into which sunlight and fresh air seldom penetrate, it is honestly observed and superbly recorded.