Bad Characters
Jean Stafford
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
<p>This book displays at their height the wit, sensibility and psychological penetration that distinguish Miss Stafford's work. There are nine stories and a novella. They range in mood from the title story, a comic portrait of a resourceful child-criminal named Lottie Jump, to "The End of a Career," an elegiac and ironic tale of the declining years of a great beauty. In "A Reasonable Facsimile" Dr. Bohrmann, a retired professor philosophy, is unexpectedly rescued from an aggressively boring young house guest. "Cops and Robbers" is a chilling story of childhood horror and lovelessness that revolves around a father's trip to the barber with his five-year-old daughter.</p><p>Several of the stories have as their common setting Miss Stafford's fiction town of Adams, Colorado&#8212;including an amusing saga of a girl's frustrated attempts to find a quiet spot to read ("A Reading Problem"), and two stories of failure ("In the Zoo") and success ("The Liberation") in the effort to escape...</p>