The Weather of the Heart

CHILDREN ARE BORED ON SUNDAY (252 pp.)--Jean Stafford--Harcourf, Brace ($3).

The great modern novelists, beginning with Dostoevsky, have probed the broad mysteries of men's souls; the finest of today's short-story writers usually probe into the remote corners of the heart. Preferably the heart should be broken, guilty or sick, but at the very least it must be troubled. One of the finest heart specialists now practicing in U.S. short fiction is Jean Stafford. A meticulous workman, she makes no quack's diagnosis, and the cases she has taken on have been few. Her favorites make up the table of contents of Children Are Bored on Sunday, and most of these stories are calculated to engage the heart of any reader who has one.

Author Stafford is a fine hand at finding the exact word, turning the perfect sentence. But what gives her stories their special stamp is a somberly muted tone of helpless rage that the things she writes about can be. Hers is no book in which to flip pages toward neatly contrived happy endings. It consists of ten small monuments to minor tragedy. Her trouble is that she cannot make them seem major.

In The Echo and the Nemesis, a girl who has eaten her way to elephantine size makes up pathetic stories about a lovely dead sister who never existed. The sister, of course, is herself "dead, dead and buried under layers and layers of fat." The huge girl is ill and has the intelligence to know it, but at the end she is compulsively devouring a glutton's meal to the horror of a friend who has found her out.

The hero of A Summer Day has a heartache he did not help to make. He is a small Indian boy, an orphan shipped barefoot and alone from Missouri to an Indian school in Oklahoma. This is the kind of situation that is usually played for a lump in the throat, but Author Stafford never plays that way. What the reader gets from A Summer Day is a dry mouth and a hot, hopeless feeling of sympathy for the boy in his loneliness.

These stories range from a subtle clash between occupied and occupiers in Germany to a fine case history in boorish cruelty and prejudice in a New England factory town. In the 15 brief pages of A Modest Proposal Author Stafford can convey the look, the heat, the boredom, and the sharp antagonisms being played out at a Virgin Islands hotel peopled by divorcees. Like the rest of these tales of interior sickness, it is a sure antidote to complacency. Like most of them, it pokes at the heart, but never makes it miss a beat.

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