The six long stories of A Party for the Girls present H. E. Bates at his finest. A crack shot at understated tragedy, Bates is perhaps at his best with comedy and character--consider the opening line of the title story: "Miss Tompkins, who was seventy-six, bright pink-looking in a bath-salts sort of way and full of an alert but dithering energy, looked out the drawing-room window for the twentieth time since breakfast and found herself growing increasingly excited." Though virtually unknown here, as Publishers Weekly put it in their review of Bates's A Month by the Lake & Other Stories (1987), his nearly perfect stories. . . should set his readers clamoring for more. . . He is as adept at the seductive rise and fall of his narrative voice as he is cunning with naturalistic dialogue. Comparisons to Joyce, Chekhov, and Mansfield are inevitable.
