Polished Performances

...There is Howard, the young barber in "Okay, Mr...

...These tales are full of odd juxtapositions—a writer turned capmaker who still davens every morning because "It's the way you're brought up"—and a humor so wry it is almost painful: "In addition to the ballet and tennis lessons, Daisy took courses at U.C.L.A., and she was also having her teeth straightened, and at parties she would scream out how the Kittershoy wives were spirited, like racehorses...

...Pappendass, Okay," who thinks up ideas for Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons in the hope of breaking away: "He didn't want a cheap relationship with cat and dog bickerings like Mr...

...It had been blowing in, thin and loose for two days, smudging the tops of the trees up the ravine where the house stood...

...In recent years he has to some extent been getting his due...

...It wasn't such a terrible crime.'" Again, in "The Amazing Mystery at Storick, Dorschi, Plaumer, Inc...

...Pritchett, for me, is one of those Chinamen...

...There were the jeerers...

...There were people who wouldn't go halfway to understand...

...Pritchett's uniqueness is the creation of a relaxed atmosphere, one that combines a penetrating acumen with a tendency to benevolence...

...This simple notion—that writing brings not only subjects and verbs but entire worlds into being—seems to be generating anxiety among many American and European (especially German) writers...

...The heroes and heroines try to inject a little romance into obdurately humdrum lives...

...Steaming in the warm rain of the June day, the last of the cattle and sheep were being loaded into lorries or driven off in scattered troupes through the side streets of the town which smelled of animals, beer, small shops and ladies...

...On The Edge Of The Cliff") "The market was over...

...lately she had been keeping an afternoon for a rather 'quaint' person, a young man called Sidney, one of a red-jacketed ballet who hopped about at the busy tea counter in Murgatroyd and Foot's...

...I'm only going to Rock-away tomorrow...

...There are fools aplenty rattling around these stories, yet they are judged lightly, perhaps because the author more often than not aligns himself with the impulses that lead his characters astray...

...Toscher or the other people in the neighborhood...

...The Fig Tree") Sometimes, however, Pritchett's stories fall short of the compellingly idiosyncratic and degenerate into mere whimsy —"The Worshippers" and "The Vice-Consul," for instance...

...On The Edge Of The Cliff (Random House, 179 pp., $8.95) contains nine new stories...

...The departing farmers left, the exhaust of their cars hanging in the air...

...Nearing 80, he continues like them to merrily endure and to defy "the tragic scene" on which he stares...

...So I said I was going to Maine . . . So what...

...The Wedding") "She liked to say it was 'inconvenient,' on the general ground that a lady should appear to complain beautifully when doing a kindness to someone outside her own class...

...Tea With Mrs...

...In fact, it is precisely his bemused appreciation of the crookedness of the heart and the willfulness of fancy that makes him such a delightful translator of ourselves to ourselves...

...What did 1 do so terrible to spoil everything...

...These stories lack the resonance his perspective ordinarily entails, and without that resonance Pritchett can begin to seem a bit soft, a bit blurry round the edges...

...Drove his motorbike head-on into a lorry, a girl with him too...

...Imagination,' he apologized...

...Marion, the secretary in "There's Always Honolulu," first devastates her beau, Marty, a shipping clerk, by announcing that she is going off to the coast of Maine for the summer and then reveals the paltry truth: " 'It was all a story for Helen and Claire...

...Their response to their own lackluster futures is more modest than one of outrage: Wafting through many of these stories is a feeling of primal disappointment, a feeling temporarily suppressed upon spotting the main chance, only to return sooner or later as a kind of disdainful lethargy...

...The Golden West") Often Fuchs uses an outsider-narrator, like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway, who observes the beauty and the wealth and the leisure without quite being able to figure out why everyone is so unhappy...

...a Walter Mitty-like office boy squanders his entire bank account on plane tickets to Salt Lake City and Chicago in the hope of impressing the 18 girls in the collection department where he works in obscurity and is referred to as "Baldy...

...What all these character share is a dim but lingering belief in "the rosy dreams of youth," a sense of disparity between their actual destinies and the ones promised them by novels and movies and popular songs...

...Horrible...

...Poor fellow was killed...

...Bittell") Or: "Duggie's voice hurried...

...Interestingly enough, "The Worshippers," which is about mutually deluded small businessmen, and "The Vice-Consul," about tomfoolery in the tropics, are the only pieces in the collection that do not feature women...

...She smiled beautifully, for she felt that there was some hope in that nod...

...This aspect of Pritchett works best when he creates an air of muddled eros or confounded intentions, where wit and compassion vie with each other almost within the same sentence: " 'We must not cling to our sorrows,' she said, for he looked vain of his, but he nodded in a vacant fashion...

...I suspect he will receive increased attention with the appearance of The Apathetic Bookie Joint (Methuen, 296 pp., $10.00), a collection of the author's shorter fiction that embodies two different styles of writing and two different styles of life: pre-and post-Hollywood...

...his three novels from the '30s, known as the Williamsburg trilogy, have been reissued in paperback, and John Updike has dubbed him "a magician...

...One need only look at some opening lines to realize how imperturbable a draftsman is at work, capturing the essence of places or situations with a few deft strokes: "The sea fog began to lift towards noon...

...But for a while, at least, in these small, clear pieces their fates are transcended, their proletarian existences rendered so faithfully that they begin to take on a shabby lyricism of their own...

...That was why he was ambitious, and if he said nothing about Walt Disney, it had been because he didn't believe in advertising in advance...

...By far the greater number of stories—and these are the ones Fuchs' reputation has been founded on—are set in dingy corners of Depression-era Brooklyn: bookie-joints, steaming rooftops, butcher and candy shops...

...Naturally, it upset my wife: she blames herself...

...Six or seven of the stories are about the other side of the world—Hollywood, California, where Fuchs has been living and writing screenplays for the past 40 or so years...

...Mixed company, it would seem, brings out the glitter in Pritchett's eyes...

...and Mrs...

...The British and Irish, though—Pritchett, William Trevor and Edna O'Brien—sally forth blissfully ignorant of the news that the state of fiction has turned restive and diffident...

...In her question one hears the ravagings of time itself...

...Both killed...

...His most successful stories—"A Family Man," "The Wedding" and "The Fig Tree"—invoke a highly-developed sense of the ridiculous: "The tuneful aunt spoke to Mrs...

...Tea With Mrs...

...His stories still revel in a droll eroticism and are permeated with implausible frictions that resolve themselves, depending upon the particular characters, kindly or unkindly...

...Wfriters &Writing POUSHED PERFORMANCES BY DAPHNE MERKIN w. hen I think of V. S. Pritchett, I think of the three Chinamen in the final lines of Yeats' poem, "Lapis Lazuli": "Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes/Their glittering eyes are gay...

...Fletcher has the head of a Roman emperor.' The aunt was baffled...

...Duggie spoke of the imagination accusingly...

...It was just for an impression— you didn't have to be so gullible...

...Someday I guess I'll go nuts and have a nervous breakdown.'" Many of Fuchs' characters are bald or balding, a detail that seems to point up the arbitrariness of their fates...

...Jackson explained, 'As it might be on a medallion.' 'He won two first prizes at Cottesbury,' said the aunt, who belonged enthusiastically to contemporary life...

...Three pieces in this latter group are nothing short of astonishing, falling somewhere between the despairing excesses of Nathanael West and the cool misery of Joan Didion: "Ecossaise, Berceuse, Polonaise," "The Golden West," and "Twilight in Southern California...

...He didn't want to stay a barber in a cheap section...

...Jackson repeated her remark to the vicar, who nodded, and she was inspired to develop the idea: 'One forgets how much of Roman wealth must have been in cattle.'" ("The Wedding") Pritchett, then, is as sly as he is saintly...

...Like the cold breath of old men,' Rowena wrote in an attempt at a poem, but changed the line, out of kindness, to 'the breath of ghosts,' because Harry might take it personally...

...Long may he thrive...

...My married sister's got a bungalow and my mother's making me go out there and help her with the kids...

...bleats a woman in "The Golden West...

...D aniel fuchs is one of those writers who for a long time was whispered about inside the corridors of literary power by people who pride themselves on taking notice of the overlooked...

...Most of the time,'" explains Jellicoe, a put-upon cop, '"I feel like it's Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn and it's raining and the radio somewhere is playing some dopey jazz tune on a three-piece orchestra...

...Jackson, and she, feeling that a fantasy of the learned kind was called for, said in a ringing voice, 'Mr...

...I'm always depressed...

...Although varying in quality, all are written with a quiet confidence in their own powers of evocation...

...Bitten") What we have in Pritchett is a belief that words are natural forces, activating rather than merely acted upon...