More Collected Short Stories, by V. S. Pritchett (Random House, 276 pp., $17.95)
We may soon lose the short story in the same way that obscure varieties of fauna become extinct—for want of a habitat. Except for a very few magazines like The New Yorker, the short story has nowhere to live. Which makes one savor the late offerings of one of the form’s great masters all the more. V. S. Pritchett is that modern rarity, a truly accomplished man of letters, a travel writer, memoirist, biographer, and critic as well as a brilliant producer of short fiction. One uses the term short fiction advisedly. One of the best things about his work is the lack of trick endings of the Maugham, Fitzgerald, or Chesterton variety, which, while invariably clever, have little to do with either life or art, reducing plot resolution to the level of a jigsaw puzzle. In 24 distinctively different but almost uniformly good stories, Mr. Pritchett repeatedly proves that brevity need not force the author to gadgetry—that character and insight (plus a generous amount of nonmalicious, humorous irony) can be infused into a good short story as well as a novel. He is now well into his eighties; one hopes he still has more to tell us, and the time to do it.
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