Review by Booklist Review
"Harold," the first short story written by Australian American Hazzard, was enthusiastically accepted by the New Yorker in 1959. It is a gem still, as are the other 27 faceted and beaming stories gathered in this showcase for National Book Award--winner Hazzard's brisk scene-setting, crisp mesh of sensibilities, cross-purpose dialogue, astutely drawn characters, excoriating humor, and breathtaking endings. This fine-crystal treasury contains Hazzard's first book of stories, Cliffs of Fall (1963), featuring decorously eviscerating exchanges between mostly privileged, if damaged, women and men. Publication enabled Hazzard to leave her frustrating job at the United Nations Secretariat, which inspired People in Glass Houses (1969), a book of piquant and caustically funny linked tales about an international cast of characters caught in the gap between idealism and bureaucracy in their work for the Organization. Uncollected and unpublished stories of intricate psychological negotiations complete this sterling collection. Cosmopolitan in location, exquisitely executed, and glinting with the sort of keen wit and perception found in the fiction of Margaret Drabble and Elizabeth Bowen, Hazzard's stories are startlingly fresh and revealing in their poise, sting, and compassion.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The early work of late Australian writer Hazzard (1931--2016), winner of the National Book Award for The Great Fire, makes for an outmoded collection, propelled by themes of mid-century bourgeois disillusionment--affairs, arguments, disappointing relationships, time spent at country houses, and trips to Europe. Despite the heavy emotional atmosphere, Hazzard's prose has the restraint and polish of glossy magazine writing, offering crisp, easy descriptions of her desperate characters. Unfortunately, the stories never quite achieve the depth they seemingly aim for, especially in those about the staff of an international peacekeeping organization from People in Glass Houses (1967). Mildly irreverent depictions of petty pensioned bureaucrats--like Achilles Pylos, who seeks to replace his plain-looking secretary for a more charming one in "The Story of Miss Sadie Graine"--may have caused a stir when originally published, but they aren't sharp enough to resonate in an era where unsatisfactory working conditions are standard fare. Meanwhile, "Vittorio," about a wizened Italian professor who discovers his female tenant might return his romantic interest, ends with a thudding banality: "He could scarcely breathe, from the stairs and from astonishment. He had never been so astonished in his life." These stories feel like quaint antiques from a bygone time. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Hazzard, who died in 2016, is best known as the author of two magnificent, intricate novels, The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003). The stories collected here offer a perfect introduction to her astringent sensibility. Born in Australia to a Welsh father and Scottish mother, she grew up in Sydney as well as Hong Kong, Italy, New Zealand, and New York, where she worked for the United Nations for 10 years. There are two entire books included here--Cliffs of Fall (1963), which features men and women searching for love but more often finding incomprehension, and People in Glass Houses (1967), a collection of linked stories set at the Organization, a not-even-thinly-disguised U.N.--as well as a number of unpublished or uncollected stories. Hazzard's characters are yearning for intimacy and perfect understanding and are not quite resigned to their inevitable disappointment: "Marriage is like democracy--it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with." Whether they're in Tuscany, the Greek Islands, or the suburbs of New York, they search for truth and are devoted to beauty; Hazzard's writing is formal, and even the dialogue is elegantly mannered: "Why, even religion--even the law, than which, after all, nothing could be more unjust--takes account of extenuating circumstances," one man improbably muses after a dull dinner party. The stories set at the U.N. are tartly satirical as Hazzard buries her bureaucrats, no matter how idealistic, under a blizzard of papers such as "the Provisional Report of the Working Group on Unforeseeable Contingencies" and checklists "painstakingly devised to avoid anything resembling a personal opinion." They feel like an up-to-the-minute investigation of the failures of White saviorism in the form of a time capsule from the Mad Men era. Sharply intelligent, nuanced, precise, and subtly hilarious. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
