For all the praise [Pritchett] has won, his work has never been fashionable in academic circles, and it is interesting to spectulate why.

In several respects his manner of writing harks back to an earlier period. He has probably long been wearied by respectful comparisons with Dickens or Wells; but he recalls these writers repeatedly in the vivid precision of his appeal to the eye and ear. Each of his major characters is distinctly visualized….

To the fastidious critic, there may be something unnerving in Pritchett's very gusto. His characters are a dubious bunch, notably deficient in the conventional brands of dignity. In fact, many of them are seedy, tipsy, sly, raffish, or randy. Yet quite clearly their creator likes and relishes them all with cheerful impartiality. He writes like a frequenter of pubs and clubs who finds ordinary people of any class or condition endlessly entertaining.

To read this collection [Selected Stories] is to be reminded that many of our best contemporary short story writers are characteristically glum. They excel in chronicling small defeats…. A typical story by V. S. Pritchett, however, celebrates a victory. His characters are survivors. Somehow, against the odds, an unlovable person finds love, an old loyalty is rekindled, lost self-respect is retrieved. This implicit optimism may not lend itself to exegesis, but it is far from facile. The tentative victories that Pritchett records are a tribute to a great variety of human qualities: resilience, jauntiness, nerve, inventiveness, cheek. His tales make life seem worth living because they repeatedly show how interesting, how various, how resourceful, the most mundane people can be.

If there is a weakness in his approach it is that his taste for gamey personalities and high jinks makes some of the stories too highly flavoured, a little overripe. In this collection the rather more sober narratives, "The Wheelbarrow", "Blind Love", "The Skeleton", and "The Spree", seem to come off best. There is in general a tendency for the predominant zest and sharpness both in description and in dialogue to crowd out the more subdued passages which the narrative needs: "It was always quiet up at Heading. Through the trees by the house you could see the stars, and the grey stone was lit by them. There was a smell of cows and woodsmoke, and there was a touch of frost in the air." The reader who has attuned his ear to the broader, more vigorous effects of the tale may miss such interludes, and with them part of the complexity that the author is striving for. Altogether these stories need suppler, more sensitive reading than they seem at first glance to invite.

My only other reservation relates to the several stories that are told in the first person. The narrator, gifted with all V. S. Pritchett's narrative skills, tends to be difficult to place. This is particularly true of "The Camberwell Beauty", perhaps the least assured work in the collection, where the style of the opening sentences, and the narrative context that they imply, are simply abandoned. But these are cavils. Here is a volume full of energy, shrewdness, and good humour. If Pritchett's stories have been academically undervalued it may be merely because they are so straightforwardly and unfashionably enjoyable.