V. S. Pritchett's first volume [of reminiscences] A Cab at the Door, takes its title from the family's habit of moving lodgings after each new failed enterprise: "A cabby and his horse would be coughing together outside the house and the next thing we knew we were driving to an underground station and to a new house in a new part of London, to the smell of new paint, new mice dirts, new cupboards." (p. 263) The rootlessness of the Pritchetts' London life, coupled with a na...

[Any] Pritchett story is all of it alight and busy at once, like a well-going fire. Wasteless and at the same time well fed, it shoots up in flame from its own spark like a poem or a magic trick, self-consuming, with nothing left over. He is one of the great pleasure-givers in our language. Pritchett himself has said that the short story is his greatest love because he finds it challenging. The new collection ["Selected Stories"] makes it clear that neither the love nor the challenge has let h...

V. S. Pritchett is not much given to quarreling with other critics, but at one point in his new collection of essays ["The Myth Makers"] he does allow himself to rebuke a professor who has been going in for some particularly jaw-breaking jargon, subjecting Flaubert to a barrage of "velleities" and "volitations." Literary criticism, he insists, "does not add to its status by opening an intellectual hardware store." Nor, one might add, by dealing in pseu...

For all the praise [Pritchett] has won, his work has never been fashionable in academic circles, and it is interesting to spectulate why. In several respects his manner of writing harks back to an earlier period. He has probably long been wearied by respectful comparisons with Dickens or Wells; but he recalls these writers repeatedly in the vivid precision of his appeal to the eye and ear. Each of his major characters is distinctly visualized….

Sir Victor has, throughout his long career as a reviewer and critic, been able to find and describe accurately what he calls, in The Living Novel, 'the new point in life from which any given novel started.' He likes to take the great, the outstanding, the enduring book and isolate the qualities that make it so. If biography helps, he tells us what we need to know; if political or cultural history is more useful, we have that; if perfectly chosen examples of style and pace are required, he prov...

[The qualities evident in the essays which comprise The Myth Makers] are a catholic enthusiasm for literature, a clear, level-headed and pithy style, a versatile sympathy, and a complete freedom from jargon, cant, bullying, pirouetting and wisecracks—a combination of qualities the more impressive when one considers that this generosity of interest continues unnarrowed and fresh in an author almost in his eighties. The disadvantages, as at least they must seem to the uninvited academic or 'seri...

Pritchett notes his debt to … other scholars at the outset [of The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev]. But he also brings two crucial gifts of his own to the work. First, he shows an unusual ability to draw the reader back into a world distant both in time and in space without allowing that world to deaden into a literary museum: The Gentle Barbarian is not only the kind of portrait with eyes that follow the viewer around the room, but a portrait so effective that its subject becomes a ...

Pritchett writes as one who has been nourished rather than inhibited by his literary forebears. Though the tradition to which he belongs has shown signs of enfeeblement in recent years, with its writers too often manifesting a weakened grasp, a contracting range, Pritchett himself is able to confront Mrs. Thatcher's England with an almost Edwardian assurance of his right to move at ease among its phenomena, to seize upon what he wants, and to do so without apology or self-consciousness. He displays a...

As I infer him from his books, V. S. Pritchett must be one of the most pleasant men in the world…. I only wish I could like his short stories, which have become his chief claim to fame. After reading them, I feel sad and somehow disappointed in myself. They, too, are generally pleasant in their way, and haphazardly piled with humanity.

Although varying in quality, [the stories in On the Edge of the Cliff] are written with a quiet confidence in their own powers of evocation. One need only look at some opening lines to realize how imperturbable a draftsman is at work, capturing the essence of places or situations with a few deft strokes: "The sea fog began to lift towards noon. It had been blowing in, thin and loose for two days, smudging the tops of the trees up the ravine where the house stood. 'Like the cold breath of old m...

Most of [the nine stories in On the Edge of the Cliff] are love stories. Most of the love concerned is adulterous. Yet one is struck not by similarity but by variety: central characters of all ages and both sexes; narration in first and third person; differences in length, in complexity and in quality. There are, of course, prevalent virtues and faults, as one would expect in pieces from the same pen. First and most often, one is struck by a sharpness of eye, a resourcefulness of phrase, that are frequently...

[V. S. Pritchett] … has been writing good short stories for many years. He is … no longer at the top of his form, but the leading story in The Camberwell Beauty is quite equal to work he did in his prime. One of Pritchett's great advantages as a writer—and one which is becoming rarer as our cultures become more fragmented—is his ability to create a variety of backgrounds: he is not tied, as so many writers are, to a single and usually restricted world. "The Camberwe...

Age has its prerogatives, excellence being foremost among them. We bow to V. S. Pritchett. Nearing 80, he is at the top of his powers, and he is writing at white heat. These nine new stories [in On the Edge of the Cliff and Other Stories] outshine his recent Selected Stories. Love was their theme, but passion is the operative force here; and the contrast between the often submerged longings and the manners of his English subjects makes these intrigues doubly intriguing. Such is their economy that you have t...

[In "The Gentle Barbarian"] V. S. Pritchett evokes the characteristic Turgenev novel—that story of unfulfilled affections, political disappointments, human wrenchings. Delicate, short-breathed critic with delicate, short-breathed author: a happy match. Nothing in this book is "heavy," nothing analyzed into the dust of boredom, nothing stretched on the wrack of literary theory. Mr. Pritchett has written a work of cameo refinement, yielding pleasure from start to finish. (p....