In Praise of Pritchett

Martin Amis

• On the Edge of the Cliff by V.S. Pritchett
  Chatto, 179 pp, £4.95, February 1980, ISBN 0 7011 2438 5
• The Tale Bearers: Essays on English, American and Other Writers by V.S. Pritchett
  Chatto, 223 pp, £6.50, April 1980, ISBN 0 7011 2435 0

V.S. Pritchett’s short stories are retrospective, provincial, formless and feminine. His is an art that does not care how peripheral it sometimes seems. There are no twists, payoffs, reverses, jackpots or epiphanies. Pritchett never rubs life up the wrong way, and is happy to leave only a faint shine on its fur. He uses the forms and addresses of minor art, yet there is no one quite like him – no one alive or male, anyway. ‘He is proof,’ Frank Kermode has argued, ‘that an older tradition could survive the importunities of the modernist Twenties and stay modern, respond finely to the world as it is.’ I am not sure how true this is, or in what ways it might turn out to be true: but it is clearly the central critical question posed by Pritchett’s quietly extraordinary way of looking at life. Of course, the answer to this question may in the end not be very relevant or even interesting, assuming as it must do that an art of such freakish fragility is pierceable by criticism in the first place.