The Dusty Interiors of Boston

Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford. Harcourt. $2.50.

This is a provocative, this is a delightful novel—the biography of a servant girl from the underworld of Dantesque infernos and her commentary on the upper world of Boston. It is written with incisive, painstaking delicacy, as if an insect recorded those minutiae which escape the average eye. Miss Stafford dissects reality with instruments which are more highly specialized than the tissue of destiny itself—and hers is, like Marianne Moore’s famed octopus, a relentless capacity for fact. She writes with the elegance of the sophist and with the macabre humor of a sceptic, the tragedy being that there is no tragedy, the drama being that there is no drama. Though a realist, she likes the deviate, the unusual. There is, for her, no great norm giver. Reality exists in particles. With controlled art, she has assembled these into one sphere, that is to say, the world of a rather too refined, too static Boston, where the great conflicts of spirit are missing or are produced as parodies of themselves, of no importance either cosmic or psychic. Everybody is his own puppet dangling on his own string, but the real body suffers paralysis, even from the shoulders up, so that there is very little mental motion, in the Henry Jamesian sense, to say nothing of the absence of physical struggle. The dazed gods nod, but they do not dream, for they have an insufficient sense of the unknowable. Perhaps because this is, in spite of a few scenes plucked from the underworld flux, Boston, where upper-crust people have long thought of themselves as ideal or nearly so.