SUMMERING: A Book of Short Stories

Felicity of feeling rather than phrase or form recommends this collection of short stories by the author of The King's Persons (p. 114, 1962) and The Monday Voices (p. 451, 1965). She has a wide-ranging empathy for human experience which reaches across cultures and ages, while her own girlhood background and confrontations are close enough to render some of her stories distinctly autobiographical. They vary in their assimilation and distance from this experience, and some are scarcely more than anecdotes, but all are alive to the possibilities of vital encounter. In one prison setting, a woman dubbed Sunshine because she can get through the day without feeling, breaks down into a sense of her own humanness; in another, a Georgia cell, a Northern white librarian finds that a Negro civil rights leader has her own dictatorial sense of superiority that must be fought. In the Hebrides, a young woman studying a dying language, receives a lesson in living from an aged islander; in the flat lands, a hill couple learn a harder lesson in the mores of the ""soft"" townsfolk. A number of the stories incorporate her own heritage which is evidently Polish-- and they are handled with some humor. All in all, a youthful sensibility worth reading for enjoyment, worth watching for development.