Start of Surprise

WHEN MY GIRL COMES HOME (240 pp.)--V. S. Prifchetf--Knopf ($4).

"It was the face of someone to whom nothing had happened; or, perhaps, so much had happened to her that each event wiped out what had happened before. I was disturbed by something in her--the lack of history, I think." It is the lack of history--suffered by the heroine of this book's title story--that must disturb any reader of Critic-Novelist V. S. Pritchett's haunting tales. The characters who move through these pages have arrived from places the reader has never visited and by routes he will never know. But for several minutes of terrifying or hilarious scrutiny, they stand as exposed and as three-dimensional as any characters in modern fiction.

Pritchett is a first-rate critic of literature (London's New Statesman) who can also write it, usually in a minor key. The people he writes of are, for the most part, determinedly average--tradesmen, housewives, laborers, accountants. But Pritchett has a gift for spotting the seeds of madness that threaten to sprout in the most prosaic minds. And he writes of his characters' inner cataclysms and defeats in a tone as dry and controlled as the featureless faces they present to the world.

In The Fall, the reader is introduced to Charles Peacock, an accountant whose only distinction is that his brother is Shelmerdine Peacock, the famous Hollywood star. At the annual company dinner, Accountant Peacock tries desperately--and fails--to attract attention with his Negro-dialect reminiscences ("The last time I saw 1'il ole brudder Shel . . ."). Fortified with whisky, sherry, hock, Volnay and brandy, Peacock resorts at last to his only trick--demonstrating the "stage fall" that his brother had taught him. At the end of the party, his audience gone, Peacock falls flat a few more times for the benefit of Queen Victoria--whose portrait stares disapprovingly at him from the wall. But when he attempts a bow, it occurs to him that this was a trick "Shel had never taught him. Indeed, at the first attempt the floor came up and hit him in the face."

In Just a Little More, an enormously fat old widower dines with his son and daughter-in-law and reminisces about his life while greedily wolfing down food ("Don't give me any more. I don't mind a couple of slices--well, just another. And some fat. I like a piece of fat. That's what I feel"). Through a long, meandering life, it becomes clear to the reader, food has been the old man's only passion. The Key to My Heart describes a young tradesman's attempt to close out an account with a notoriously tight-fisted but loose-loined gentlewoman. At first the gentlewoman tries seduction instead of settlement ("I like a man who works. You work like your father did--God, what an attractive man!"), and when she is rejected, pays all of her other creditors but vengefully leaves the tradesman holding the bill.

Pritchett's people are caught--as by an exploding flashbulb--in a continual start of surprise. The inexplicable pressure of events, they seem to be saying, has bent them into postures they had never foreseen. Before they can straighten up, furl their umbrellas and walk on, the reader has learned everything about them he will ever need to know.

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