Word: pritchetts
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When My Girl Comes Home, by V. S. Pritchett. In these short stories, a first-rate writer and critic (Britain's New Statesman) spots the seeds of madness in the most prosaic minds...
...that each event wiped out what had happened before. I was disturbed by something in her-the lack of history, I think." It is the lack of history-suffered by the heroine of this book's title story-that must disturb any reader of Critic-Novelist V. S. Pritchett's haunting tales. The characters who move through these pages have arrived from places the reader has never visited and by routes he will never know. But for several minutes of terrifying or hilarious scrutiny, they stand as exposed and as three-dimensional as any characters in modern fiction...
...Pritchett is a first-rate critic of literature (London's New Statesman) who can also write it, usually in a minor key. The people he writes of are, for the most part, determinedly average-tradesmen, housewives, laborers, accountants. But Pritchett has a gift for spotting the seeds of madness that threaten to sprout in the most prosaic minds. And he writes of his characters' inner cataclysms and defeats in a tone as dry and controlled as the featureless faces they present to the world...
...Pritchett's people are caught-as by an exploding flashbulb-in a continual start of surprise. The inexplicable pressure of events, they seem to be saying, has bent them into postures they had never foreseen. Before they can straighten up, furl their umbrellas and walk on, the reader has learned everything about them he will ever need to know...
...become empty of meaning. Baldly stated, this spiritual situation is hard to comprehend. But by means of Greene's great novelistic art, the powerful magic of a born and practiced fabulist, the reader is compelled to understand and share such desiccation of soul. As British Critic V. S. Pritchett says of Querry-in a sense of contemporary man-"He can face a fact; he cannot feel." In the face of intolerable pain, man responds by anesthesia. His fate, made visible and horrible in the doom of the leper, is death on the installment plan...