There is a sort of story which we may call the non-story, beloved by highbrows. To the vulgar it appears merely pointless, words almost literally about nothing: to the initiated it presents frozen moments, delicate studies in depth of character and situation. The form is by no means new. Its queen was Virginia Woolf, her court the Bloomsbury set of the twenties and thirties. So completely do non-stories hold the intellectual field that Mr. E. M. Forster can talk contemptuously about “the atavistic desire for a story.”
When My Girl Comes Home, by V. S. Pritchett. Knopf, $4.00
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