09/14/2020
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.)
"Hazzard manages to convey that there’s much more beyond the platitudes we tell ourselves, that human emotions — love, pain, jealousy, grief — are never as neat and manageable as we tell ourselves . . . Hazzard understood the human condition in all its contradiction, all its messiness, like few others. “Collected Stories” is certainly essential for admirers of the author, but it’s also a wonderful read for anyone who loves fiction that delights and enlightens, challenges and rewards." —Michael Schaub, The Boston Globe
"This new volume offers fans of Hazzard’s much-loved, prize-winning novels, “The Transit of Venus” (1980) and “The Great Fire” (2003), a chance to look back at her development as a writer. And what an exquisitely polished writer she was, at once serious and bitingly funny, a master of both the plush, well-rounded sentence and the oblique takedown . . . To dismiss these revelatory, human stories as fusty relics would be merciless — and unaccountable." —Heller McAlpin, The Los Angeles Times
"Hazzard’s stories are shrewd, formal and epigrammatic. One feels smarter and more pulled together after reading them . . . Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: 'We are human beings, not rational ones.'” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
"In Collected Stories, we see Hazzard practicing the floor routines of her later novels, sticking all the landings if not always having yet worked out the full choreography. The erudite similes and lethally precise adjectives are there, as are the astute observations about domestic phenomena. . . The intellectual thrill of her work arises from her ability to describe the small, constituent particles of emotional matter we typically consider irreducible." —Alice Gregory, The New Yorker
"To read the rigorous formalism of Shirley Hazzard . . . is to discover the apostate’s pleasure upon returning to the faith. Her works—whole, cruelly exacting, consoling in their grace and precision if not their ultimate outcomes—are monuments to fiction’s disappearing pieties . . . She is the master of the offhand, psychologically acute detail that reveals a character’s diminished circumstances, be they moral, sexual, or material." —Dustin Illingworth, The Nation
"This definitive collection of Hazzard’s short stories is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent . . . Hazzard’s stories . . . built her early reputation. This impressive collection confirms their enduring stature." —Dinah Birch, The Times Literary Supplement
"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 . . . Sharply intelligent, nuanced, precise, and subtly hilarious.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ 2020-07-29
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.
