Books: Stories Through Plate Glass

THE WORLD Is A WEDDING (196 pp.) —Delmore Schwartz—New Directions ($2.75).

These quiet stories of middle-class Jewish families in New York may seem at first almost too transparently told. But most readers will soon recognize the art in the telling, the overtones of irony and pathos produced by the right clichés, in the right places. With these stories Poet Delmore Schwartz should take his place among the dozen or so most accomplished young U.S. writers (he is 34).

A kind of studied coyness and poeticism occasionally flaws a prose that is otherwise like a sheet of plate glass. But the two longest pieces (the title story and one called The Child Is the Meaning of

This Life) will suffer no disgrace by comparison with Chekhov or Stendhal for a hurting sense of human relationships.

The writer is aware, as most of his characters are not, of the depth of mystery that lies behind the sorrow—as behind the pride—of the intellectual Jew.

Alienated from their religious tradition, from the America of the immigrants’ illusion, and painfully disabused about each other, the characters of his stories seem brought to bay in the great supercivilized bewilderment of New York City. Often they are presented in a dimension of depth, two or three generations rapidly telescoping into one terrifying puzzle of defeated hopes, rancor and self-ignorance. The types recur: the intense, ambitious, unimaginative older son who is the pride of the family and the one whom death cuts down; the hardworking, kind elder sister; the young girl, liberated and “radical”; the pampered shy and idle younger son; and the down-to-earth, eternally anxious, adoring mother who endures.