AMERICAN STORIES
THE LAST HUSBAND, and Other Stories, by William Humphrey; Chatto and Windus, English price 12/6. HE short story belongs to our time: a portmanteau age, though the word is already out of date. The race is to the swift, and publication to the brief. Even the novelist earns his leisure to write, and the name to justify publication, by magazine pieces. William Humphrey is an American who has been printed in the best places: The New Yorker, The Swanee Review, Harper's, and The Quarterly Review of LiteraSa ture. They don’t make many mistakes, and they haven’t in his case. He is one of the innumerable competents in his particular genre, who would have _achieved greater recognition in any time other than his-own; but naw "also yo) tips There is a moving story about a boy and his father’s gun; and how he grows up suddenly one day, freeing himself from the image of his father. There. is a wickedly subtle story, ingenuously told by a dirst-person narrator much less subtle than the author, about an erring husband. There is a pathetically tragic little story about a second wife, old and worn out, finding herself ousted by the first: "She thought of Virgie, safe in Heaven these fifty years, safe in Mr. Hardy’s mind, forever young and pretty. Surely, she thought, shuffling a finger across her withered lips, surely when the Lord called you, you didn’t have to come as you were. What else could Hell be?" Altogether there are 238 pages of pleasant bedside reading, with more than a hint that Mr. Humphrey’s novel-in-progress will be worth buying.
A.
V.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540813.2.23.5
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 14
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272AMERICAN STORIES New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 14
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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