Act of Faith and Other Stories

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MOST people will read these twelve masterful short stories, all of them dealing with the impact of war overseas on the men and women involved in it, simply as stories, brief, compact, and poignant. Others will see them as outstanding examples of the new American technique in short-story writing. They will note the implications behind the commonplace dialogue; they will feel that here is the impact of Hemingway with an almost greater reticence and economy. And both schools will be right. These slices of life are stories of strong human and dramatic value. Persons and problems are presented with an oblique vividness — and then what? No problem is solved, and the reader is left, to wonder what happens to these people, what can happen to them in this world of war and confusion. Such wondering will not injure the reading public.

Mr. Shaw is better known as a playwright than as a writer of stories. In this collection he uses his dramatic technique with a sure, unerring skill. Each story is a very short play which has no neat ending, no quick, ultimate curtain. And the author is behind or within his characters, He knows and appreciates them. Something of himself speaks in their words. He is artist, observer, soldier, and spokesman. Perhaps their full values can be felt only by those who have known and seen at first hand similar people and places under the abnormal tensions of war, but even the least initiate can appreciate the veracity and skillful handling of these sketches, whether or not aware of their less obvious somber undertones.

Most of them are reprinted from the New Yorker and Collier’s Weekly; the least effective, the only story which approaches banality, “The Veterans Reflect,” is reprinted from another source. Mr. Shaw’s readers hope that he will comment on the perplexed civilian scene with the same sympathetic talent which shines in these brilliant pictures of the background of war. R.E.D.